20091206 Contemporary Art and Climate Change

 Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change

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by ROB MAGUIRE on DECEMBER 6, 2009 · COMMENTS (1)

From Art Threat: artthreat.net/2009/12/rethink-art-climate-change/

As politicians, bureaucrats and environmentalists head to Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference, international culture vultures will descend upon four Danish art institutions to engage with environmental issues from a more colourful perspective.

Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change is an art exposition featuring 26 international artists whose work creates new ways for the public to grasp complicated climate change issues. Although many artists have been producing work inspired by the topic for years — Quebec’s ATSA is one of my favourites — the role art can play in educating the public and inducing behavioural change is now attracting widespread interest.

The exhibit provides a playground in which you can explore climate change and the environment from unconventional angles. Rethink invites you to “imagine a mountain moving to the beat of a seismograph, flying biospheres in the sky and hundreds of plastic bags with acid rain. What is it like when art merges with sounds from the Mexican jungle, satellite tracking data of the currently ‘most blue sky’ or arctic birds?”

I’m tempted to fly out to Copenhagen just to crawl around inside one of Argentinian architect Tomás Saraceno’s shiny, transparent spheres, gingerly suspended high above the gallery floor. Of course, as fun as that sounds, it’s probably not worth the 2.3 tonnes of CO2 that the flight would add to my carbon footprint.

Now, while some may question the role art can play in averting climate change, but the answer is easy for Saraceno: “Art is about trying to rethink the things you take for granted.” This view is echoed by the Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, Connie Hedegaard. “Art can act as a source of inspiration and initiate reflection. Naturally, I hope some of the many politicians who come to Copenhagen for the climate conference in December will be inspired by the exhibition. However, it is also important that citizens get the opportunity to view the climate challenge from a cultural perspective.”

Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change runs until April 5, 2010 at the National Gallery of Denmark, closing earlier at other participating galleries. Visit their website for details.

Images (top to bottom): Biospheres by Tomas Saraceno, Solplænen by Eric Andersen, Safety Gear for Small Animals by Bill Burns.

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20091211 Australia: North Korean Art, without the Artists...

 From ABC Australia: www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/11/2768809.htm

Art imitates politics

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By Virginia Trioli

Posted Fri Dec 11, 2009 12:27pm AEDT 
Updated Fri Dec 11, 2009 12:39pm AEDT

When the pugnacious former Victorian premier, Jeff Kennett, was asked by the Catholic Church - a long, long time ago - to get in between them, the public and a particularly controversial work of art, the political leader best known for shoving his foot in his mouth on many occasions, performed a surprisingly graceful sidestep.

The work in question was Adres Serrano's photograph, 'Piss Christ' (urine, a crucifix) and the furore of this photo being exhibited at the state's National Gallery was being well-fanned by the usual suspects: art lovers who would go to the wall for anything, even something as silly as this; conservative broadcasters; the Church; the telegenic artist himself. Surely, the Church pleaded with the Premier, a work as blasphemous as this should be removed from state-funded walls? Jeff Kennett wasn't biting. He blithely cautioned that if anyone thought they might be offended by seeing the photo, then they should go and see a Rembrandt painting instead. Or play a game of tennis. He'd seen both, so he was off for a few sets himself.

The days when politicians knew to deal themselves out of art controversies if they weren't going to join the aficionados at the barricades, are long gone. Provocative photos, barely glimpsed in reproduction, are deemed "revolting" by a Prime Minister, just in time for that night's edition of the tabloid news; any even faintly stimulating image is now inspiration for yet another lecture on the erosion of family values. Kennett knew one more bushfire he didn't need when he saw it: the Federal Government appears to be less squeamish about wading into a fight about censorship.

The surprising decision taken this week by the Federal Government to prevent a clutch of North Korean artists from arriving in Australia for an exhibition of their work - pieces already in the country and hung by Australian curators - twists Governmental anxiety over the grave dangers of art into a strange, new shape. Fear not the image, anymore - creator, get thee hence.

The six artists, Pak Hyo Song, Kang Yong Sam, O Song Gyu, Rim Ho Chol, Ri Jong, and Pak Yun Chol, had been selected as part of the sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. They are members of the Mansudae Art Studio in Pyonyang, which is reportedly the official atelier of the father of the Dear Leader, Kim Il Sung.

Their work is already here; but the artists cannot be because, according to the Government, "Australia's visa ban on North Korean nationals is part of the Government's response to North Korea's missile and nuclear weapons programs".

Their images of benign, benevolent leaders and happy, toiling workers are astonishingly well-painted (A grim fact of totalitarian art is that it is invariably of a remarkably high technical standard - remember all those grand Soviet-realist visions of brilliant sunsets, the ruddy, happy faces of the workers, the future represented in rolling hills without end?) The gallery maintains the work is not propaganda, but it is impossible to imagine that art produced in North Korea and then cleared for temporary export could be anything else. The more important issue is that it hardly matters if it is.

There has always been great merit and fascination in the presentation and analysis of the art of propaganda. A chance to sneak any kind of glimpse into the working life of a North Korean artist when the West is actively trying to engage its truculent leadership is surely not to be missed - and especially not when the apparently poisonous fruits of their labour are nonetheless deemed fit for consumption. What does the Government fear? Reverse-indoctrination by the tourists seems a remote possibility, but a discomfiting defection or two is a little more likely.

The timing of the decision is curious, coinciding with US President Barack Obama's special representative to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, arriving in Pyonyang, signalling a new phase in US diplomacy. It's the highest level official American visit in more than a year. Is the Australian government's decision helpful to that process? Unhelpful? Does it even matter?

It surely would to the artists. Just as the hard-baked edges of nationalistic self-protection softened a little to see North and South Korean athletes walk hand in hand onto the Olympic arena in Bejing, the "soft diplomacy" of cultural visits between the isolated regime and the West are flashes of a possible world. It's significant to remember that the New York Philharmonic travelled to Pyongyang for performances in 2008: the US government clearly had no qualms about official disapproval of the North's nuclear ambitions being diluted by a little Gershwin.

I am, like others, now left to imagine the lost opportunity of pairing this current-day socialist-realism with the ironic and sly faux-propaganda of so many of the contemporary Chinese artists who enjoy great success in this country, and that the Queensland Art Gallery has been so perceptive in displaying: Guo Jian's hysterical Red Army members or Zhang Xiaogang's ghostly family portraits, commentary on authoritarian regimes that would seem shocking to the North Koreans.

The juxtaposition would be remarkable: the constructed fantasy of the North Koreans meeting the bitterly-experienced reality of the Chinese. Would that the North Korean artists could have been around for that encounter: it would have been a discussion without precedent. A true cultural clash. And we squibbed the opportunity.

But what has been lost, too, is the human element. How wonderful for the citizens of one of the most benighted countries on earth - whose art bears no relation to the life of privation and oppression lived by the real inhabitants of their painted land - to spend some time among our rolling hills without end.

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20091226 Cuba through Cuba's Eyes

Exhibition of contemporary Cuban art is informative though not exhaustive

Cuba Avant-Garde: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Farber Collection, now showing at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, raises questions about Canadians' idealized notion of Cuba as a vacation spot and socialist paradise.

The expansive exhibition contains many viewpoints from contemporary Cuban artists that can expand and enrich our understanding of Cuba, drawn as they are from a private collection. State oppression, impoverishment, exodus, religion, gender and race are all addressed. However, it's interesting to note that the Farbers have taken care to distance their collecting activities from any political stance.

The artists themselves are direct in addressing Cuban politics. Artist Ángel Delgado was imprisoned for a performance that included defecating on the state newspaper. Using the humble materials available to prisoners, Delgado continued to create. His prison number, referencing the erasure of individual identity, is stencilled onto one handkerchief; three men, their tongues intertwined in a complex knot depicting networks of communication and, possibly, eroticism amongst inmates, is inked onto a second square of cloth.

Unsurprisingly, Fidel Castro is a recurringfigure in many of these works. His iconic bearded head floats disembodied above a man naked but for a top hat in one of Carlos Cárdenas' naive, comic book-like drawings.

A stumpy, lumpy version of Castro appears again in Fernando Rodriguez Falcón's five carved wooden panels, Nuptial Dream. The series depicts the wedding of Fidel Castro to Our Lady of Charity of El Cobro. Falcón adopts an outsider artist identity as his alter ego Fransisco de la Cal, and strives to create an aura of authenticity for his works using rustic and folksy subjects and aesthetics. The scenes are amusing, though no one - Castro, Our Lady of Charity or the artist's stand-in - looks happy. Different moments in the courtship and wedding between church and state are represented, including a blindfolded Castro playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and the newlyweds dressing as the artist spies on them from a window. The artist disarms these powerful entities by making them seem foolish and notes the role of the artist to expose those in power.

Repression by the instruments of the state is not the only injustice documented in Cuba Avant-Garde. A series of photographs entitled White Things by René de Jesús Peña Gonzàlez foregrounds racial divisions in the supposedly raceless and classless society. In one photograph, a cigarette rests between the artist's lips, hinting at the erotic power of the black phallus, his face powerful and impenetrable behind sunglasses. In Black Man's Underwear, the artist appears vulnerable, his backside presented to our gaze, white underwear tucked between his ass cheeks.

While by no means a complete overview of contemporary Cuban art, the Farbers' collection reveals a commitment to learning about Cuba through artistic expression.

Sandee Moore left the mild climes of her B.C. home for the warm embrace of the Winnipeg arts community six years ago. She is an intermedia artist, a former director of Video Pool and occasional arts writer.

CUBA AVANT-GARDE
Until Jan. 10, Winnipeg Art Gallery

20100102 The Politics of the Film Avatar...

 The Phenomenon, Politics and Art of 'Avatar'

By James Pinkerton
 - FOXNews.com
 
Thanks to Cameron’s directorial determination, the camera, as well as the computer, can now show us things we’ve never seen before.
Let’s talk about “Avatar,” the new movie from James Cameron, the director of “Titanic,” on three levels. First, as a soon-to-be-worldwide phenomenon. Second, as a political statement. Third, as a pathbreaking techno-artistic expression.
Two out of three ain’t bad--alas, the superficial politics of the film are those of superficial Hollywood. But wait, there’s more. As we shall see, while the film’s nominal politics are on the left, the “meta-politics” are well to the right. But I am getting ahead of myself.
First, the phenomenon. “Avatar” is getting great early buzz; a picture of Zoe Saldana (OK, it ‘s a picture of Saldana’s character Neytiri, a 10-foot-tall sapphire-toned computerized representation of the actress) stood at the top of the Drudge Report earlier this week, next to the words “Oscar Bound.” And The Hollywood Reporter gave it a rave: “The movie is 161 minutes and flies by in a rush. Repeat business? You bet.” And for reasons we will get to in a moment, the film should also play well overseas.
Second, the politics. Set in the year 2154, the story is set in motion by the efforts of an evil corporation determined to stripmine the mineral resources of a distant planet, the emerald-green Pandora, no matter what the cost to Neytiri and her fellow Na’vi. The Na’vi are the tall-and-thin blue “people” on the planet, although they are clearly modeled on the noblest of Native Americans. And yet they are referred to as “blue monkeys” by the wildly unsympathetic corporate greedhead who oversees the intended rape of the planet--and the annihilation, if need be, of its inhabitants.
Into this verdant world of Pandora comes a wounded warrior, Jake Sully, who is sent by the corporation to infiltrate his way into the Na’vi through the use of a flesh-and-blood clone of the Na’vi--that is, through an avatar, which Sully controls by remote control through his own thoughts. In the computer parlance of 2009, an “avatar” is an online representation of oneself; in a century-and-a-half, the film tells us, we’ll be able to live an extra life in a another real body, seeing and living through it as if it were our own. But Sully, now a Noble Blue Giant, at least part of the time, falls in love with the Na’vi--specifically, with Neytiri, the sexiest blue beanpole any of us have ever seen. Soon, Sully has gone rogue; he leads the Na’vi in a war against the corporate plunderers.
A white man “going native.” Where have we seen that before? It’s the story of “Dances With Wolves,” for openers, along with a little bit of the old cartoon series, “Captain Planet.” And did I mention there’s a maniacal military officer as the heavy? Needless to say, this character, Colonel Quaritch, gets all the best lines in the film, and indeed Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, is so over-the-top that he is destined to develop his own cult following, as did Lee Ermey, two decades ago, for his poetically profane performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in the 1987 film, “Full Metal Jacket.”
Director Cameron has thus made another film that is anti-corporate, but pro-military. As we have seen in in other Cameron films, such as “Aliens 2,” soldiers (or Marines) are portrayed as strong, tough, resourceful, and decisive. If they do bad things, it’s because they are following bad orders, not because they are inherently malevolent. The real baddies, in Cameron’s cine-scenarios, are the corporate suits and fatcats; that’s probably not an unpopular message in 2009--although some might recall that “Titanic,” released 12 years ago, displayed a distinctly populist edge; it was the rich men in that film who pushed their way on to the lifeboats, displacing women and childen.
OK, so the politics of “Avatar” are left-wing, anti-corporate and anti-imperialist. There are even some even some indirect digs at George W. Bush and Operation Iraqi Freedom. A left-leaning Hollywood movie: no surprise there. So Third Worlders will eat it up. The Iranians, for example, should love “Avatar”--if, of course, their government would let them see it, which surely won’t happen.
The surprise is the third element: the art -- and that’s the right word for it -- of “Avatar.” As they say about the best escapist movies, for two hours -- in this case, for 161 minutes -- you really believe you are somewhere else. In this instance you are transported to faraway Pandora, flying in helicopters, riding on dragons, leaping from one mile-high tree branch to another mile-high tree branch. All in 3-D. Yup, they give you the funny sunglasses. You’re darn tootin’ it’s impressive.
Cameron has worked on and off on this project for more than a decade; in so working, he has pushed the technical capacity of moviemaking to a new plateau. In the future, all action/adventure movies will be held to a higher technical standard.
With a Cameron movie, you expect shoot ‘em up action. You expect an affection, bordering on reverence, for technology, especially for guns and heavy weapons. You even expect crisply drawn characters, such as that of Sigourney Weaver, indelible as she was in the “Alien” movies, and now, too, in “Avatar.”
But what you’re not ready for, in “Avatar,” is the expert depiction of the Na’vi, utterly lifelike in their blue hugeness. Thanks to Cameron’s directorial determination, the camera, as well as the computer, can now show us things we’ve never seen before.
Moreover, “Avatar’s” visual realization of a faraway world -- a world that is somewhat like earth, except that its plant and animal life is lusher and plusher and more colorful -- is going to influence fashion and design for years to come. Indeed, the film’s liberal sprinkling of glow-in-the-dark plants -- always tasteful, in a cool-jazz kind of way -- will inspire both science and commerce.
You heard it here first: Some folks -- including some fatcats and corporations -- are going to skip past the film’s politics and focus on the visual opportunities afforded by “Avatar.” They will riff, in particular, on “Avatar’s” landscapes, translating the computer-generated imagery of the film into a real-world garden-resort. Sort of like Disneyland on steroids, although perhaps more like Disneyland on DNA. That’s right, a mega-corporation will see this film about a ruthless mega-corporation and ruthlessly apply science and engineering to create a capitalist paradise of genetic manipulation. Oh, the irony: capitalism making money out of capitalism. But wait a second: What was director Cameron’s ultimate intention? To make a cool movie, or to make money? I report, you decide.

So we come back to the “meta-politics” - -the politics above the politics -- of “Avatar.” And these meta-politics lean right, not left. What do I mean? After you get past the corporate-bashing, you see a hero -- played by Sam Worthington, a hunky up-and-comer last seen in “Terminator Salvation” -- who faces profound temptations and so must make a stark moral choice. Choosing to do the right thing, this hero proves his own superiority through manly combat. Thanks to his courageous leadership, he ends up saving the day and getting the girl. (Oh, did I give that away?) That’s not exactly handwringing liberalism. Indeed, some advanced leftist critics will inevitably complain that “Avatar” is actually racist, because the Na’vi need an outsider -- a heterosexual white male -- to save them.
But most of all, “Avatar” is a show -- a great ride. And in some new form, “Avatar” will indeed be a ride someday, a destination Xanadu like nothing you have ever seen.
James P. Pinkerton is a writer and Fox News contributor.

20100202 Art and Politics in Iran: Robert C. Morgan

It would be an understatement to say that Iran exists in turmoil largely due to internal conflicts. The ideological separations occur on two levels: within the Islamic community there are historical differences between the Shiites and the Sunnis. This we know. However, what has come into international prominence in recent months, given the aftermath of what many believe to have been a bogus election, is the tension between “the Islamic Republic of Iran and the idea of Persia,” (to quote the catalog essay of the exhibition, The Promise of Loss: A Contemporary Index of Iran) which constitute strong differences between orthodox and liberal positions within the fabric of Iranian society. In either case, this “continuous face-off” has been more or less the mainstay over the past 30 years. In addition, it would appear that forces from the outside have had a tendency to exacerbate these conflicts, either by taking advantage of the disjuncture (as in the Iran-Iraq War) or by lacking a clear understanding of the history from which these conflicts evolved. In our highly mediated, politicized era, this conundrum has found little respite. Internal political conflicts emanating from within the region are never easy to discern, particularly when interpreted from the outside. Ambiguity filters through the news media, and, in the process, oversimplifies the reality. As a result, the unreality is heightened through the rhetoric of confrontation. It is a power play on all sides perpetuated through heavily invested globalized networks. Conflicts are instantly “branded” and the consequences of this branding are authorized by “the news.” The question is: whose news?

The game of conflict is what we get from media and what we have come to expect. In contrast, an effort to discuss the internal circumstances at work in Iran with detailed accuracy might actually begin a discussion that would lead to diplomacy. Media moguls would regard this point of view as belonging to the old school of journalism and therefore irrelevant. Instead, we are offered standardized ploys of non-negotiation that eventually begin to dictate foreign policy. As diplomacy succumbs to irrelevant excess and speed, perspective is lost on the human condition, namely, that human beings really do live in a world of differences. By ignoring this fact, and by ironically citing the term “globalization,” the opposite strategy comes into effect, thereby suggesting we must inevitably acclimatize our non-thinking apparatus to the aerosol of sameness. Unfortunately, sameness is not the reality in the Middle East and clearly not the reality in Iran. This is the major premise employed by Berlin-based curator, Shaheen Merali, in organizing The Promise of Loss: A Contemporary Index of Iran at the Arario Gallery in West Chelsea. In support of his thesis, Merali states that “the exhibition is a consolidation of many dashed hopes [where] artists enable both a reading of the situation and encouragement to cross the distance where the bitterness of loss reigns within the national morale.” Artists such as Samira Abbassy, Behrang Samadzadegan, and Jinoos Taghizadeh stand out in the way that they narrate horrors, games, absurdities, and atrocities through their symbolic figurations.
The photojournalist Abbas Kowsari creates fantasies in which women in

black chadors change roles with the police, aggressively at work keeping the population in line. On a lower key, the video artist Rozita Sharafjahan employs repetitive loops where people walking in the street suggest a claustrophobic environment where one fears any display of difference.

Curating an index of Iran is a daunting task given that many of the artists included in the exhibition actually live and work in Tehran and continue to produce social and political comments. The Promise of Loss—an ironic title indeed—marks a different approach from most of the exhibitions of Iranian art that were shown in New York during the summer of 2009. (The notable exception would be the one organized by gallerist Thomas Erben, who previously traveled to Tehran for the purpose of organizing an exhibition of both established and emerging artists.) Some of the artists in The Promise of Loss were familiar to me from my visits to Tehran in 2007 and through meetings outside the United States. Two of these artists,

Mandana Moghaddam and Parastou Forouhar, live in Sweden and Germany, respectively. Their installations and paintings not only confront viewers with issues such as women’s rights and the casualties of the Iran-Iraq War, but also strive to communicate a point of view that aspires toward positive change.

Iman Afsarian lives in Tehran and is truly one of the significant artists currently working in Iran. His paintings of dark interiors and common household objects, appliances, and furnishings, shown without figures, are filled with distraught feelings of solitude and alienation. Babak Golkar, a young architect, does installations in which designs from Persian carpets are extended into three-dimensional space, creating structures weirdly reminiscent of the models built by Malevich in Moscow during the 1920s. In connection with this exhibition, there was a panel discussion the day following the opening in which art historians and a group of artists spoke about their work. For some reason the curator was not present, and the discussion was strangely apolitical, almost as if the impetus for the event was another exhibition, a cautionary display shown somewhere else. The somewhat eerie mood that transpired only further emphasized the loneliness, anxiety, and suspension that many Iranians feel—the fear that the wrong word in an uncertain place will project an unpredictable backlash. This, of course, is closer to the truth than the audience—or, for that matter, some of the panelists—may have cared to understand.

 http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/artseen/art-and-politics-in-iran

20100205 Guruh Soekarnoputra: The arts and politics are my tools, by Prodita Sabarini

Guruh Soekarnoputra, the youngest son of Indonesia's first president Sukarno, recently announced he was running for chairman of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), a position held by his big sister former president Megawati Soekarnoputri for 17 years.

As soon as his announcement was made, political analysts and senior PDI-P functionaries commented that they doubted whether his influence would match that of Megawati's and whether he was serious in challenging the status quo in the party.

Guruh's response to the doubters: "I am committed to serve the people of Indonesia.

"My life is about service. As a warrior, I dedicate myself to service," he said in a visit to The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Under the shadow of Megawati's popularity, Guruh, who is a member of the House of Representatives, has always been more renowned for his art than his politics.

Guruh first founded the art group Gencar Semarak Perkasa (GSP) production and produced stage performances and then the Swara Mahardhika. In the 1980s, he founded the music groups Guruh Gypsy and Gank Pegangsaan.

In terms of being serious about politics, close friend and Guruh's aide Aji Barata said that Guruh was a long time player.

"Guruh is very serious about his politics. In 1991, Guruh was ready to be president," he said. "People think Mas Guruh is merely an artist entering the political arena. But, he's more than that," he said.

For Guruh, the arts and his involvement in politics were his tools for his struggle to bring change.

He said the grass roots at the PDI-P requested him to bring about change in the party. He made his declaration on his candidacy on Jan. 16 at a gathering in his residence on Jl. Sriwijaya, Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta, attended by hundreds of sympathizers.

He said in the PDI-P people did not nominate themselves to run for leader of the party. Instead, the constituents were the ones who nominated their candidate.

Guruh said, as a party member, he did not need a blessing from the chairman. However, as the youngest child, he had an obligation to ask for a blessing from his elders in the family. "I told my sister that a lot of people had requested I run for PDI-P chairman and I asked for her blessing," he said.

According to Guruh, Megawati was fine about his intentions. However, she reminded him that the party was not theirs; therefore he had to go and talk to his constituents.

Guruh said he thought personally that Megawati was tired of politics. "However, Mega is a warrior. If people ask her to serve, she will never refuse," he said.

Guruh said he was concerned about how there were multidimensional crises happening in the country. "There's a crisis in morals, a crisis in leadership, a crisis in politics, and a crisis in culture," he said.

For him, as with any political party, the PDI-P has its flaws. "All the parties are not in good shape. Including the PDI-P," he said. He said the PDI-P need internal change to be able to compete in the national political arena.

"What I will do is create a revolution, which is actually not such a loaded word. Revolution means a rapid change," he said.

Commenting on the PDI-P and his sister's leadership, he said: "I feel sorry for my sister".

In 1999, the PDI-P was the winner of the first election after Soeharto stepped down. "But that didn't make her president," he said. Only after former president Abdurrahman Wahid was impeached did the presidential position become available for Megawati.

He said the party was losing in the political rankings.

Guruh, in a philosophical tone, said he aimed to be a shepherd in life. He said in every religion in the world, humans are shepherds. "What's a shepherd? A shepherd is a leader. And leaders are teachers," he said.

"Every human child should prepare themselves to be a teacher, a leader, a shepherd for the generation after them," he said.

He said his task was to convey good news and show the right path. "The correct path is Pancasila," he said, referring to Indonesia's national principles.

If he succeeded in becoming chairman of the party and was nominated as president in 2014, there was a chance that Guruh would be the first single candidate in office.

Guruh married Gusyenova Sabina Padmavati from Uzbekistan in 2002, but the couple has separated.

Guruh pointed out there was no prohibition on a presidential candidate being single. He said being single could be a good thing. "If we think positively, as a single person one can concentrate and focus more on the people's problems," he said.

However, he said he did have a possible companion candidate. "From observation, looking around and investigating things. There is *someone*. However, we have yet to reach a verdict on whether the person will be my companion. There needs to be a fit-and-proper test first," he said jokingly.

Apart from his political activity, the 57-year-old is producing a new rock album titled The Tragedy of Democracy (Tragedi Demokrasi). Guruh said the band, called Kaca Benggala, was a five-member group.

Despite being a music-producing politician, just like president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), he refused to be compared to the latter. "I'm not like SBY. I've been releasing albums since 1976," he said, smiling.

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20100331 Zimbabwe Political Parties Condemn Arrest of Bulawayo Artist for Political Paintings

31 March 2010, Thabang Mathebula and Patience Rusere | Washington

Most of Zimbabwe's major political parties have roundly condemned the arrest and detention of Bulawayo visual artist Owen Maseko, detained last week for staging an exhibition with scenes of the 1980s Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland and Midlands.

Thabang Mathebula reported from Bulawayo that leaders of the Movement for Democratic Change formations led by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, as well as the revived Zimbabwe African People's Union, called the arrest a breach of civil liberties that showed freedom of expression was still not guaranteed in the country.

Maseko’s exhibition included a painting showing President Robert Mugabe and the late liberation leader and Vice President Joshua Nkomo signing the 1988 unity accord which brought an end to conflict between their rival Zimbabwe African National Union and Zimbabwe African People’s Union, respectively, forming the present day ZANU-PF.

Nkomo is shown slumped over the table, blood flowing from his shoulders, whereas Mr. Mugabe sits upright. Behind is a row of men in dark glasses, presumably security service agents.

The Unity Accord, under which Mr. Mugabe, then prime minister, became president, and Nkomo vice president, ended the so-called Gukurahundi, a Shona word meaning "the early rain that blows away the chaff before the spring rains." Both sides took up arms, mainly divided along Shona and Ndebele ethnic lines, but the Matabeleland Ndebele were the main victims as the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade carried out massacres claiming thousands of lives.

Amnesty International weighed in on the Maseko case and other human rights abuses, urging President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Tsvangirai to condemn human rights violations and instruct judicial authorities to drop the charges against Maseko.

Amnesty said rights abuses violate the Global Political Agreement for power sharing by ZANU-PF and the two MDC wings, and set back national healing efforts.

Amnesty International Zimbabwe researcher Simeon Mawanza told VOA Studio 7 reporter Patience Rusere that his group will make formal representations to the government of Zimbabwe and the Southern African Development Community on rights violations.

http://www1.voanews.com/zimbabwe/news/politics/Amnesty-International-Con...

20100402 Apartheid-Era Song Swells Racial Tensions In S. Africa

 by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

April 2, 2010

In South Africa, a judge has ruled that a song once sung by anti-apartheid activists as a rallying cry against the white minority regime is now "unconstitutional and unlawful."

Anyone found singing "Kill the Boer," the judge said, could face charges of incitement to murder. The ruling has touched off a bitter racial debate in a country still grappling with its racist past.

Julius Malema, president of the ruling African National Congress Party's Youth League, has drawn criticism for singing "Kill the Boer" in a crowded stadium during his 29th birthday celebration. The Boers — white South Africans also known as Afrikaners — didn't appreciate that.

"It is incitement to violence and hatred directed at a particular group in South Africa, which is — the word that Malema is using is ibhunu, but it particularly means 'boer' or 'farmers,' " says Ernst Roets, the national chairperson for AfriForum Youth, a wing of an Afrikaner civil rights organization. The group is seeking a full trial to ban "Kill the Boer" and other such songs.

But African National Congress spokesman Jackson Mthembu says the song is being taken out of context. He says it is about the fight against oppressive white minority rule or apartheid.

"At the time, Dubula Ibhunu meant — and it still means — kill apartheid," he says. "You could not make a difference between the system of apartheid and the Afrikaner community at the time."

President Jacob Zuma and the ANC have pledged to go to the country's highest court to "protect and defend" the song as an integral part of their heritage of struggle for freedom and justice. Mthembu says the earlier judicial ruling was "incompetent."

But Roets says that while heritage is important, "it's unacceptable to try to justify a song in which the killing of a particular group is encouraged — to say that it must be seen in context and it's part of their heritage."

Roets' organization has drawn up a list of some 1,600 white farmers murdered in recent years. The ANC says the song was not responsible.

But Roets says a song like "Kill the Boer" creates a climate for such violence, and says that since Malema sang the song, it has stirred up deep emotions in Afrikaners.

"I can tell you, we've literally received over a thousand e-mails and phone calls from people who are, on the one side, very sad and very scared about these statements, and on the other side, people who are very angry and frustrated, and they want to do something," Roets says.

The ANC's Mthembu says: "Like in everything else, some words might be frowned upon now, when you look back, but at the time there was no frowning ... so it doesn't assist you to ban them. What should assist you is for all of us not to repeat apartheid."

But with the re-emergence of the song, the fragile racial peace that's existed since apartheid is being challenged — not only in the courts but on Facebook, where both blacks and whites are exchanging bitter comments that hark back to the days of apartheid.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125473544

Lyrics:

Ayasab' amagwala (the cowards are scared)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
ayeah
dubula dubula (shoot shoot )
ayasab 'a magwala (the cowards are scared)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
awu yoh
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)

awe mama ndiyekele (mother leave me be)
awe mama iyeah (oh mother)
awe mama ndiyekele (mother leave me be)
awe mama iyo (oh mother)

aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)

Ayasab' amagwala (the cowards are scared)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot )
ayeah
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
ayasab 'a magwala (the cowards are scared)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
iii yoh
dubula dubala (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)

awe mama ndiyekele (mother leave me be)
awe mama iyo (oh mother)
awe mama ndiyekele (mother leave me be)
awe mama iyo (oh mother)

aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)

Ziyarapa lezinja (these dogs are raping)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
ay iyeah
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
Ziyarapa lezinja (these dogs are raping)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
ay iiiyo
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)

Aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
Aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
Aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
Aw dubul'ibhunu (shoot the Boer)
dubula dubula (shoot shoot)

Ayasab' amagwala (the cowards are scared)
Dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
Ay iyeah
Dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
Ayasab' amagwala (the cowards are scared)
Dubula dubula (shoot shoot)
Ay iyeah

Dead Kennedy's "kill the poor"

Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the Neutron bomb
It's nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
But no less value to property
No sense in war but perfect sense at home:

The sun beams down on a brand new day
No more welfare tax to pay
Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light
Jobless millions whisked away
At last we have more room to play
All systems go to kill the poor tonight

Gonna
Kill kill kill kill Kill the poor:Tonight

Behold the sparkle of champagne
The crime rate's gone
Feel free again
O' life's a dream with you, Miss Lily White
Jane Fonda on the screen today
Convinced the liberals it's okay
So let's get dressed and dance away the night

While they:
Kill kill kill kill Kill the poor:Tonight
 

20100410 Brewing a dialogue: Coffee talk inspires mix of 'Art and Politics'

By: Tim Brouk

A typical bull session outside of K. Dees Coffee on a sunny day has yielded a new art exhibition.

Lafayette artist Denise Hiestand's "Art and Politics -- The Dialogue" depicts a scene of seated men and women conversing in front of the downtown Lafayette coffee shop.

The participants in the conversation face one another in their chairs and are mid-discussion. In the real scene, Hiestand did not hear what was being discussed.

"I had wondered what they would be talking about," Hiestand said. "I though they would probably be talking about politics."

"Art and Politics -- The Dialogue" opens at 6 p.m. Friday in downtown Lafayette's newest gallery -- the James Werner Fine Art Gallery, 529 Main St. The show is open at 6 p.m. every Friday in April.

In the main scene, Hiestand added her own subtleties. A cross-legged man smokes a pipe in a thoughtful, listening pose while the rest are in the middle of giving their opinions. She added a girl in the coffee shop's window reading a copy of a book titled "Mr. Smith Haunts Washington." The book is an ode to one of her favorite political movies -- the classic Jimmy Stewart film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

"I think everyone should see that movie," Hiestand said.

That 1939 movie will be a part of the run of "Art and Politics." The unique show is only open on Fridays starting at 6 p.m., but each Friday will screen a movie or provide "open mics" for people to give their political opinions. Other Fridays will offer nonpartisan panel discussions and platforms for candidates.

James Werner is leasing the gallery space with an option to buy. A local artist and a candidate for the Tippecanoe County auditor, Werner thought "Art and Politics" was a good show to open with.

Werner will have one painting in the show: "The Money Changers." The work was inspired by G. Edward Griffin's book, "The Creature from Jeckyll Island."

Werner may add more paintings, and he and Hiestand are inviting members of the community to submit their own political- or socially-themed two-dimensional art throughout the run of "Art and Politics."

"I'm not opposed to hanging salon style," Werner said. "We have a 20-foot wall -- why not cover it?"

http://www.jconline.com/article/20100401/ENT01/4010304

20100410 Malcolm McLaren, Punk Innovator, Dies

Obituaries page contributor Terence McArdle writes:

On Friday, we ran an obituary of Malcolm McLaren, manager of the seminal U.K. punk band the Sex Pistols. Throughout his career Mr. McLaren, a true eccentric, was obsessed with the intersection of fashion, music and politics.

The various Sex Pistols first met at SEX, a boutique specializing in bondage wear that Mr. McLaren co-owned with designer Vivienne Westbrook. SEX originated as the less successful shop Let It Rock, where they sold clothes tailored to the Edwardian tastes of the Teddy Boy subculture.

Mr. McLaren had earlier managed the New York Dolls, a metal band from New York, when they found themselves stuck in the U.K. at the end of a tour.

Mr. McLaren hit on the gimmick of having the Dolls dress in clothes with hammer and sickle, the symbol of the Communist party. As gimmicks go, it failed to keep the band afloat but it did point the direction for Mr. McLaren's later endeavors.

His fascination with radical politicals resulted from his early involvement with the Situationists, a group of French Marxists who sought to bridge the gap between art and politics. The Sex Pistols -- or at least the concept they represented -- were esssentially Mr. McLaren's brainchild.

New York Dolls singer David Johansen, said of him, "He was the perfect preservation against stuffiness and a lack of humanity."

The Sex Pistols railed against more than stuffiness. With "Anarchy In The U.K.," they became spokesman for an angry generation in Britain, with too little wealth and too few prospects.

Their song "God Save the Queen," recorded in time for the Queen's Silver Jubilee was banned from the BBC upon its release.

Ironically, Mr. McLaren's business partner Westwood was later awarded the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth in 1992 for her contributions to fashion.

Mr. McLaren and Westwood's bizarre fashion ideas briefly dominated the English pop scene. In 1979, after the breakup of the Sex Pistols, Mr. McLaren managed Adam and the Ants, an act that tallied 11 U.K. hits. Mr. McLaren dressed the band up with eyeliner and in foppish romantic era clothes right out of Fielding's Tom Jones. The look was dubbed "new romantic."

From the ashes of the Ants came another McLaren-managed band, Bow Wow Wow, whose records were heavy on drums and sometimes Bo Diddley beats.

Perhaps believing that there is no such thing as bad publicity, Mr. McLaren often strived to provoke a reaction. Bow Wow Wow touched off a major controversy in the U.K. when 13 year-old singer Annabella (with the distinctive quiff hairdo) posed nude on the cover of the group's 1981 album in a tableau patterned on Impressionist painter Edouard Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postmortem/2010/04/malcolm-mclaren-punk...

20100426 'Hope' Artist Shepard Fairey Not Pleased With Obama's Performance

Published on Monday, April 26, 2010 by NBC- New York

In creating his now iconic Obama "Hope" poster, Shepard Fairey went from being a cult street art figure to an artist synonymous with Barack Obama's revolutionary 2008 presidential campaign.

Fairey, who is engaged in a lawsuit with the Associated Press over the use of one of the news agency's photos as a reference for the artist's iconic work, is pleased, however, with the role his art played in the Obama campaign.

"I'm very proud of the Obama poster ... because it's an image that showed that someone outside of mainstream politics, outside of corporate lobbyists could do something that affected what's going on in politics," Fairey said. "I think what really is the problem with the two-party system is that it's very difficult for people without power to make a difference unless they try very hard. But the more people that do try, the easier it gets."

The artist Shepard Fairey is proud of his iconic poster, but is not 
overjoyed about Obama's performance as President. "I think what really 
is the problem with the two-party system is that it's very difficult for
 people without power to make a difference unless they try very hard. 
But the more people that do try, the easier it gets."(Mawuse Ziegbe)

While the Obama poster made him household name, the underground spirit of his Obey stickers and posters, which have been plastered around the world, is what endears Fairey to the work that initially made him a street art star.

"I'd say the grassroots, do-it-yourself ethos of the Obey campaign is what's more important to me because it's about doing something with very little resources and building a following and building a platform to communicate," he said.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/26-4

20100426 Abraham Obama: A Guerilla Tour through Art and Politics

Abraham Obama is an image melding the faces of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. It was originally a painting by world reknown artist Ron English and fast became one of the most recognizable icons indirectly involved with the Barack Obama campaign for president. It is the subject of a documentary of the same title. It has been featured on CNN, NPR, and distributed world-wide on the internet. It even has its own song called The Obama Song.

The Abraham Obama image becomes the center of a image tour when a crew of merry pranksters (Ron English, Daniel Lahoda, Don Goede (as Jack Medicine) put up as many pasters, stickers, and posters of the image in as many places as physically possible in each city they pass through. They are followed everywhere they go by a camera crew (director Kevin Chapados and director of photography Chunwoo Kae). This visual documentary explores the adventure of Ron English s image Abraham Obama and all it encounters on a national and world tour leading up to, during, and after the 2008 presidential election. It begins in Boston and picks up steam in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and takes time at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado.

The crew disbands and all continue with the image in their respective cities. It captures the attention of the public, the media, celebrities, and people of all walks of life stopping only for this book. The last chapter finds the image on tour in Hong Kong and The Phillippines. The connections between Lincoln and Obama grow even more now making the image not only iconic but relevant as Obama prepares for his first term. All major news sources are making parrallels between the two political figures.

http://msmdcnews.com/abraham-obama-a-guerilla-tour-through-art-and-polit...

http://www.amazon.com/Abraham-Obama-Guerilla-Through-Politics/dp/0867197...

20100426 The Politics of Street Art

Last updated: Apr 26th, 2010

by Shilpa Bhatnagar

It’s often covert, seldom pretty and almost always controversial. Its perpetrators have been branded as criminals and stars alike. Like it or hate it, Street Art, or graffiti, as it is usually called by opponents, is an urban phenomenon you cannot ignore.

From the East End of London to the suburbs of Paris and the alleys of Lisbon, urban authorities seem to be in a perpetual state of war with this phenomenon. Often seen as subversive and ugly, most people feel that street art is a nuisance; its creators a bunch of juvenile, jobless criminals; and that it has no place in modern, civilised civic space. Historically it has been associated with urban decline, poverty, crime, derelict spaces and ghettos; and all over the developed world, local governments have issued laws and decrees against it. Yet it not only continues to exist, it seems to be proliferating.

Of late, street art has created a few stars, however controversial, like Banksy and Shepard Fairey (of the Obama “Hope” posters controversy). In some cities, there seems to be a new quasi-formal lobby for street art rather than against it. This has taken shape in the form of hugely popular online communities like Wooster Collective, and physical galleries like Black Rat Press in East London dedicated to showcasing the works of veterans like Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Brian Adam Douglas, d*face etc. all of whom have their origins in the murky world of graffiti. Far from being painted over, Banksy’s work is now protected in London and New York and the mainstream success of his recent film couldn’t be better proof of the fact that street art has managed to straddle over the boundary  that has traditionally existed between the informal and formal worlds of art.

I have always been interested in street art as an urban phenomenon. Most of it is subversive and bordering on the criminal, no doubt, but can it also be an instrument of political and urban commentary? Can it be, in some way, ‘controlled’  as a device to foster dialogue between the communities that create graffiti and the authorities, rather as a form of cold war between them? And is the fact that some street art is crossing over towards a more formally recognised form of art in some places, a positive trend with significant cultural and political implications for the City?

I think it is possible – though not without its own set of challenges and limitations – that handled with the right balance of sensitivity and sternness, a dialogue between authorities and street artists (as representatives of disadvantaged communities in our cities, more often than not) could break the traditional barriers between them. What do you think?

20100505 Exhibition marks 40th anniversary of May 4 Kent State University shootings

05 May 10 @ 04:18pm

FROM: http://southern-courier.whereilive.com.au/lifestyle/story/exhibition-marks-40th-anniversary-of-may-4-kent-state-university-shootings/

20100506 VIDEO: Shepard Fairey and Robbie Conal on the Power of Political Art in Public Spaces

May 6, 2010

In this chat with fellow artist and long time fan Shepard Fairey, Robbie Conal discusses the use of public space for art and challenges us all to take action.

Best known for his unapologetic in-your-face style of political street art, Robbie Conal is ready to take us on a new journey with his new book Not Your Typical Political Animal.  But that doesn’t mean his ideas of creating art anywhere and everywhere have changed.

In this chat with fellow artist and long time fan Shepard Fairey, he discusses the use of public space for art and challenges us all to take action. 

20100510 Street Art Moves Onto Some New Streets

By CHLOE VELTMAN

Published: May 7, 2010

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/arts/design/09sfculture.html

For a short while a few months ago, a mural by Eddie Colla enlivened an otherwise grubby stretch of wall in an alleyway in the upscale Hayes Valley neighborhood. The image, depicting two nearly naked and tattooed young women entwined in a sensual kiss, was a witty political message. The words “Just Married,” spray-painted in crimson above the couple, suggested the artist’s stance on gay marriage, while the six crushed beer cans dangling from strings attached to the women’s thighs like postmodern wedding garters conveyed his offbeat sense of humor. But like many street works — broadly defined as the stencils, murals, posters, tags and stickers that appear, often illegally, in public spaces — Mr. Colla’s mural didn’t last long.

Perhaps its fate might have been different had it appeared in the Mission district, where street art has long been embraced as a source of neighborhood pride. Works from that area are the subject of the recently published book “Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo” (Abrams), with a foreword by Carlos Santana. Precita Eyes, a Mission group that sponsors murals and runs regular tours of street art, and the de Young Museum are in the midst of a yearlong series of monthly events spotlighting Mission street artists, each attracting an average of 3,000 attendees since the series began in November. Several street artists associated with the Mission, including Shepard Fairey, R. Crumb and Barry McGee, are internationally renowned.

But with wider recognition, street art in the Mission appears to have lost a bit of its edge, though much captivating work is still being produced there. Now some of the freshest and most thought-provoking pieces are turning up elsewhere, like the spray-painted and stenciled images found in neighborhoods like SoMa, the Tenderloin and Bayview-Hunters Point.

Take Chor Boogie’s mural “The Color Therapy of Perception,” a riotously vibrant painting of a pair of eyes stretching along Market Street near downtown. It has the visual power of a kaleidoscope, and its subject matter is an evocation of the author and activist Jane Jacobs’s pronouncement on urban safety: “There must be eyes upon the street.”

On Commercial Street in Chinatown, works by the British street artist Banksy feature crudely drawn red peace and love signs next to an intricately rendered doctor checking out a heart symbol with his stethoscope, questioning if 1960s idealism remains in good health.

“In neighborhoods like SoMa, Bayview-Hunters Point and the Tenderloin, the work feels more expressive and free,” said Justin Giarla, owner of the White Walls gallery in the Tenderloin, which is presenting an exhibition of works by the graffitists Blek le Rat and Above. “The street art scene in the Mission is comparatively much more structured.”

Street art, both the legal and illegal varieties, has long found fertile ground in San Francisco. The murals inside Coit Tower atop Telegraph Hill were commissioned as part of the New Deal’s first public art projects. The work and influence of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera also helped to forge San Francisco’s passion for street art. The Mission became a hub for the form in the 1960s and ’7os partly because of its high concentration of Latino residents who brought in mural-making traditions.

The arrival of art-oriented organizations like Precita Eyes and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which view street art as a core component of their activities, also contributed to its rising visibility in the Mission. Street art has become so inextricably linked to the Mission’s culture that today it often has the blessings of the city and property owners.

“In the Mission there is a real respect for muralism,” said Luis Cancel, director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Street artworks outside the Mission have not had the effect of those in that neighborhood, partly because of an absence of community interest. That perhaps helps explain why Mr. Colla’s mural, admittedly produced illegally, had a short shelf life.

Sometimes, even works by famous artists have been erased by accident. Last fall a monochrome portrait of a heavy-lidded man wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, made on a garage door at 1009 Market Street, was mistakenly painted over by a contractor working for a neighborhood improvement group. That piece, which the Luggage Store gallery commissioned in 1994, was created by Mr. McGee.

The city is working to promote street art in parts of town beyond the Mission through programs like StreetSmARTs, which aims to reduce graffiti vandalism by connecting established artists with landlords on mural projects. The local artist Jet Martinez is currently working on a wall-length mural based on Mexican floral textile patterns in collaboration with a Tenderloin bookstore owner.

The city’s efforts in this area are laudable, but they seem ultimately more concerned about reducing graffiti than promoting street art as a form of creative expression. There is also a danger that if the city plays too great a role in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, the works produced there might come to resemble their more establishment-friendly counterparts in the Mission, at the expense of their artistic edge.

20100512 Teacher Slams Flag Art, Praises Obama Picture

By: Sean Hannity

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," May 11, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: The liberal bias and anti-Americanism is infiltrating America's public schools. Now last week we told you about a group of California students who were disciplined for wearing American flag t-shirts to school on Cinco de Mayo.

And now another California student, this time a 13-year-old girl, has been reprimanded by a teacher for making this drawing of the American flag which reads, "God bless America."

Now meanwhile a student in the same class was praised for making a drawing of the Anointed One President Barack Obama. Now the school's principal reportedly apologized when he heard about the incident. But the teacher who deemed the drawing offensive for whatever reason still has not apologized.

And joining me from Morgan Hill, California, are the young girl who made that drawing of the flag Taryn Hathaway, and her mother Tracy.

Guys, welcome to the show. Thanks for being with us.

TARYN HATHAWAY, STUDENT WHO DREW AMERICAN FLAG: Thank you.

TRACY HATHAWAY, DAUGHTER DREW AMERICAN FLAG: Thanks for having us, Sean.

HANNITY: Alright. Taryn, let's start at the beginning. So you're given an assignment in class. What was the assignment?

TARYN HATHAWAY: It was to sketch whatever you wanted to and when you are finished you had to have pointillism.

HANNITY: OK. And so there was no restriction, there was no guidance. You got to choose what you wanted to draw, right?

TARYN HATHAWAY: Yes.

HANNITY: OK. And this was not a political class? Not a religious class? This was an art class?

TARYN HATHAWAY: Yes.

HANNITY: OK. So now — walk us through. So you draw a picture — by the way you're very talented. What grade are you in, Taryn?

ARYN HATHAWAY: Seventh.

HANNITY: All right, you're in 7th grade.

TARYN HATHAWAY: Seventh grade.

HANNITY: Alright, so you drew a beautiful picture of the American flag, "God bless America." What happened from there?

TARYN HATHAWAY: She walked up to me and said it was offensive and I asked why? And then she just walked away not telling me why.

HANNITY: And you never got an explanation as to why?

TARYN HATHAWAY: No.

TRACY HATHAWAY: No.

HANNITY: Alright. And tell us about — you had another student in the class that drew a picture of Barack Obama. I assume they had a little, you know, bubble that said "Yes, we can," chant — you know, I mean —

(LAUGHTER)

HANNITY: What did the teacher say to that?

TARYN HATHAWAY: She said, "Thank you for supporting our country."

HANNITY: Wow. Now —

TARYN HATHAWAY: Yes.

HANNITY: Mom

, you and apparently your husband stepped into this and you met — you went to school. What happened from there?

TRACY HATHAWAY: We had a meeting with the principal and the teacher. And my husband asked her point blank, what do you find offensive about my daughter's art? The flag or God bless America?

She didn't have an answer for us. And she still hasn't answered. She then said that she didn't say that, that she never said the flag was offensive, the drawing was offensive. It wasn't until later in the meeting when she found out that another student in the class had heard what she'd said that she backtracked and said well, I could have said it, I can't remember if I said it.

Again, there's been no apology so —

HANNITY: Alright. So once the teacher was caught the teacher tried to deny it and there was a witness, so I might have said it at that point, which is an admission.

TRACY HATHAWAY: Right.

HANNITY: So, why would the principal apologize and not force the teacher to apologize? Because don't you think this crosses a line as a parent? That this teacher is trying to indoctrinate and impose their political views on your daughter?

TRACY HATHAWAY: Yes. Absolutely. And the one thing that I've never had issue with the drawing of the president. My issue was, why is that acceptable and supportive but the one thing that in this country stands for the freedom and liberties we all hold dear is offensive?

I've never understood that. So —

HANNITY: Taryn — yes go ahead.

TRACY HATHAWAY: — the principal apologized for having — I'm sorry, for us having to go through this and deal with this. He was appalled that the teacher had said that.

HANNITY: Taryn, this may sound like a basic question. You're in 7th grade. Why did you decide to draw this particular picture, if you don't mind me asking?

TARYN HATHAWAY: I don't mind. The reason why I drew it was because we could draw whatever we want. And I wanted to show that I'm a free American citizen and I can draw whatever I want and I wanted to support our country.

HANNITY: And what is the reaction of other students and other kids in school then?

TARYN HATHAWAY: They just said, "Wow, why did she say that? "

HANNITY: Meaning the teacher? Alright, last question.

TRACY HATHAWAY: Yes, and the support has been overwhelmingly —

HANNITY: It's positive. OK. Do you want this —

TRACY HATHAWAY: Yes.

HANNITY: Do you just want an apology or do you think it would be appropriate for the teacher to be fired?

TRACY HATHAWAY: Really all we're looking for is an apology for our daughter for the fact that she's been made an example of in the classroom that really — there was no call for it. It was outrageous and should never have happened.

HANNITY: Alright. If the apology is not forthcoming, do you go further with this?

TRACY HATHAWAY: Yes, we will.

HANNITY: You will go further.

TRACY HATHAWAY: Yes.

HANNITY: All right. Well, Taryn…

TRACY HATHAWAY: Yes.

HANNITY: … you're a great role model to a lot of kids. And by the way, I think your art is spectacular. And if you want to sell it, I'm willing to put in a bid, OK?

(LAUGHTER)

TARYN HATHAWAY: Thank you.

HANNITY: Alright. And thank you both for being with us. Appreciate it.

— Watch "Hannity" weeknights at 9 p.m. ET!

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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,592676,00.html

20100512 Venezuela streets brim with revolutionary art

(Reuters) - Blood drips from Hillary Clinton's severed head. The Virgin Mary cradles a machine gun. Karl Marx shares a wall with Hugo Chavez.

An explosion of "revolutionary" graffiti, posters and murals across Venezuela is spreading the Chavez government's ever-more radical messages to try to form a new generation of socialists and counter opposition propaganda.

"Given that capitalism has taken over the media and tries to distort reality, we are taking our vision onto the street," said Eduardo Davila, a young graffiti artist with a pro-government group called "Communication Guerrillas."

The often government-sponsored art fits in with a major push by the Chavez government this year to dominate the public arena, ranging from a presidential Twitter account to training youths in Web skills and painting the houses of the poor.

The profusion of murals, stencils and slogans on Venezuela's streets has a striking visual effect and a rallying impact on supporters -- even though Chavez's foes dismiss it as a shallow attempt to boost his sinking popularity.

Perhaps the most notable image to spring up recently is a politicized take on Italian master Caravaggio's "David With the Head of Goliath" that shows a young boy with a sword clutching U.S. Secretary of State Clinton's bleeding head.

Further illustrating the quick end to Chavez's early fruitless overture to Barack Obama, another image shows the U.S. president as a manic-eyed half-human and half-robot next to the slogan: "The Empire's New Toy."

Given the Chavez government's bitter political feud with neighboring Colombia, it is no surprise that Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's former defense minister and now a presidential candidate, appears on a wall with devil's horns and wild eyes.

Elsewhere, in murals full of bellicose symbolism, the Virgin Mary and Jesus carry AK-47s.

Those pictures illustrate the self-described Christian- and Marxist-inspired militancy of Chavez, who quotes as often from the Bible as he does from past revolutionary thinkers.

BRIGHTENING THE BARRIOS

One of the most frequent images to show up is a reproduction of a famous photo from 1989 street riots known as the "Caracazo," showing three men running through the capital's streets carrying the corpse of a comrade shot by soldiers.

"Not forgotten, not forgiven," says a slogan under one picture of the "Caracazo." The event brought vilification on the government of then-President Carlos Andres Perez, whom former soldier Chavez sought to overthrow three years later in a failed military coup.

Chavez himself shows up frequently in street art, his face on one wall in a line including fellow revolutionaries Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Simon Bolivar.

Street artists have formed groups in Caracas and elsewhere with one taking the name Communicational Liberation Army in a spoof of Colombia's guerrilla movement, the National Liberation Army.

Chavez and his followers also are taking their propaganda war to new fronts, including the Internet. Chavez's new Twitter account @chavezcandanga, for example, has become the most followed from Venezuela.

Dozens of teenage students have been formally enrolled and sworn-in as "Communication Guerrillas," taught filming, web and other skills to counter the traditional anti-Chavez bias of Venezuela's private media since he took over in 1999.

"These are our weapons: camera, microphone, recorder, the streets, the pamphlets, the murals," Dayana Serrano, 15, said at a training session for a government initiative that has outraged opposition parties. "We don't have pistols or anything like that and we hope they never give them to us."

Chavez's popularity has dropped this year but, he still retains a near-50 percent approval rating. Much of his popularity comes from social missions in poor neighborhoods -- providing free schools and clinics and painting houses for free.

The "Barrio Tricolor" or "Three-color Neighborhood" mission has gathered pace this year, with soldiers going into poor parts of Caracas to spruce up dilapidated houses with a fresh coat of paint, new roofs and other repairs.

Critics deride the initiative as a cheap, vote-winning tactic limited to areas widely seen from highways, and literally painting over communities' deeper problems.

But for the thousands of residents whose houses are now bedecked in bright Caribbean colors, the gratitude is genuine.

"No other president bothered to do anything for the poor. Chavez is the only one," said 60-year-old Clemencia Linares, as soldiers in T-shirts emblazoned with Chavez's face hammered away at her new roof in a Caracas shanty-town.

"This is nothing short of a miracle."

(Additional reporting by Patricia Rondon, Carlos Rawlins and Efrain Otero in Caracas; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Bill Trott)

20100513 ALTO ARIZONA: A Call to Action!

by: Ian Dosland    

   With the signing of SB1070, and the attacks on Ethnic Studies courses in Arizona, it has become a hotbed of racial political debate. From this debate, large scale protests have sprung up all over the US, though mainly in the pacific southwest. On the front lines of the protests police stand ready, with weapons at their sides, to squeach any uproar that that they view as too violent. But, what are protestors armed with? 

        Protestors have been armed as well. Obvisously, not with guns, but something much more powerful: art. Artists have been banding together creating some of the most passionate and inspiring posterwork; the likes of which I have not seen in my lifetime. Those armed with these posters vehemently wave them as they march down our city streets.

        Since all of this, a webpage has been created, calling artists to the cause. The site is not only a wellspring of information on the topic, but it provides a sort of "art forum" for everyone to submit posters. These posters, in themselves, carry with them a political dialogue. When you look at the mass of work on the front page, you are not just looking at posters, you are looking at an artistic dialogue.

        The site brings together works by artists like Lalo Alcarez, creator of the comic strip, "La Cucaracha." His poster (shown at the top) has been popping up in many of the rallies, and its image speaks louder than any protester could yell. However, Lalo does not limit himself to the visual realm of artepolitik, he is also a radioshow host. He hosts of the Pocho Hour of Power radio show on L.A.'s Pacifica station KPFK 90.7FM.

        I recommend that everyone go to the website, and check out all of the ways you can help. At the very least, bask in the visual splendor the site has to offer.

http://altoarizona.com/artcampaign.html

20100514 Graffiti Artist Adds Color to French Burka Debate

by: Caroline Rossiter

Nick Walker is a modern day “street artist”, a sketchy position that straddles glitzy art world events and covert decoration of public space. Using a combination of stencil and freehand work, Walker is amongst the pioneers of stencil graffiti, following in the footsteps of French stencil artists Blek le Rat and Jéf Aerosol. He began stenciling in the early nineties, in the midst of what has been dubbed the “Bristol Underground Scene”, the vibrant urban music and arts movement that spawned such artists as Massive Attack, Tricky, Roni Size and the infamous Banksy.

Walker recently made his mark on the streets of Paris with Le Corancan, a chorus line of Moulin Rouge style French can-can dancers, their faces hidden behind black veils. Walker came up with the idea a few months ago when he heard about the French government’s plans to ban the burka in France. He created a stencil in his studio before coming to Paris in March to stun unsuspecting passers-by.

Unfortunately the piece has already gone the way of much street art – removed at the behest of city authorities. This may be disappointing for street art enthusiasts. But isn’t the ephemeral nature the very essence of street art? From an artist’s point of view, it must be frustrating not to have control over their finished work.

When quizzed on the short-lived glory of Le Corancan, you might expect a vitriolic response, berating the over-zealous French authorities. Walker remains level-headed: “Once it’s on the wall and you’ve left the scene it’s pretty much fair game. If it stays up a week it’s a result. The aim is to get the piece up, document it and move on. This time the whole piece was filmed.”

So the act and the recorded performance are as important as the finished piece. But how does the transience of pieces like Le Corancan relate to the increasingly commercial genre of street art? Some critics argue that graffiti’s original impetus - rebellion - has been eclipsed by the rise of profitable street art. Can the two coexist or is there a danger of street art becoming an empty gesture when it’s no longer on the street?

“I get asked this question a lot…” says Walker [note to self: try to be more original]. “It’s just another genre that has now been accepted by the art world. Why do people want souvenirs from the sea side? Human instinct, and supply and demand.” He has a point. Think of the throngs of tourists in museum gift shops buying postcards, people always want to have a little piece for keeps. Street art at auction and in galleries is like a scaled-up version of buying postcards in the museum shop: it’s never going to be as good as the real thing but it’s nice to be able to take it home.

Even so, the street still seems to be the most inviting canvas for Walker, offering a visibility and scale that may be lacking in studio art, as well as a rebellious rush. “Nothing beats the thrill of getting away with an illegal piece especially when it’s quite a big production. Painting on the street in general is an important part of my art. The street is the biggest gallery you can wish for and if you find a spot in a busy area your work isn’t going to go unnoticed.”

At four meters long on a very visible wall, Le Corancan certainly got more attention than it would have done if it was in a gallery. Does Walker feel strongly about the controversy over the Muslim burka in France? “I believe that wanting to ban the burka is a crazy decision typical of a leader with far-right views. First he wants to ban the burka next he’ll be wanting to ban baseball hats or hoodies. Where will it stop?”

Despite the political impact, the humorous juxtaposition of Belle Époque and modern day France is amusing and visually arresting in itself. It is reminiscent of another of Walker’s risqué works: the Moona Lisa, in which Leonardo’s well-known sitter for the Mona Lisa reveals her pert buttocks from underneath her robes. Walker seems to enjoy humorously pushing the boundaries of taste. “Not all my pieces have political connotations” he says “most of my work has an element of humor in it or, like The Morning After series, a central character.”

The Morning After series follows a smart gentleman and his waggish acts of picturesque vandalism: painting the town, using a remote control giraffe to paint “vandal” high up on a wall, blowing up a colorful rat… The protagonist, in his pin-striped suit and shiny bowler hat is like a dandy-graffiti artist. Could he even embody the modern street artist – scrubbed up and smart for his new role as art world lovie? That’s not how Walker sees it: “He’s just a character – the city gent outfit is a decoy – no one expects anyone dressed like this to be up to mischief.”

Mischief is a good metaphor for the role of street art today. Walker’s home town Bristol, also home to Banksy (there was even some speculation a couple of years ago that Walker was actually Banksy), is so proud of its home-grown talent that parts of the city now have the appearance of an open air gallery of street art. Is there anything particular about Bristol that makes it such fertile ground for this sort of artistic production? “It’s the cider” says Walker.

courtesy of: http://thefastertimes.com/visualarts/2010/05/14/graffiti-artist-adds-color-to-french-burka-debate/

20100517: Graffiti terrorists

by: Mary MacVean

When Ronald Lamonte Barron confronted a tagger on Pico Boulevard and was shot and left to die for his efforts, the killer committed a small act of terrorism.

If the idea was to scare us, it's working.

Any doubts I might have had about that were erased one recent Saturday morning. I was jogging toward home at the end of a run along Pico, west of La Brea, just half a mile from where Barron died that February night.

When I run, I don't listen to music, and I hate company. My mind goes its own way as my body huffs and slogs around mid-city L.A. That day, I was preoccupied with how not to crush the snails on the sidewalk.

I looked up and noticed a teenager, one hand holding his baggy jeans not quite over his red plaid boxers. In the other hand he held a can of black spray paint. My first instinct, as I watched him tag a cinderblock wall, was to run across Pico and confront him. As the mother of two teenage boys, I'm accustomed to chastising them and their friends. Then I remembered the guy who got shot.

So I just watched. Jogging very slowly, and trying not to seem like I was looking. Other pedestrians appeared to be doing the same thing. There was a dad pushing a baby in a stroller, an older woman with a mesh plastic shopping bag. There was steady but not heavy car traffic.

The young man finished and ran to the corner, where he got into a dark gray sedan. I saw it had California plates, but I couldn't read the number. The driver was older, wearing glasses, respectable looking. Like a dad dropping off his son for music lessons or tutoring.

And here's what really horrified me. They didn't drive away. They drove a block or so, and the young man jumped out again and sprayed over another tagger's handiwork, adding his own. And again. Three times in maybe five blocks.

No one did a thing. No one yelled out. Or tried to stop him. Maybe, like me, they were scared.

The police don't want us to confront taggers, who could be armed, says Adam Green, the senior lead LAPD officer for my neighborhood. Get a description, get a license plate number, but keep your distance.

Tagging seems intractable and, as Green says, "out of control." Taggers, who are sometimes affiliated (such a highfalutin word in the circumstance) with gangs and sometimes just with tagging crews, are usually minors and usually work in the dark, Green says. Their handiwork gives them bragging rights with other taggers.

The language of graffiti is often opaque. Who is "Shorty?" What does "EXP" mean? But the broader meaning is more than clear.

"It brings the community down, the property values down," Green says.

By late afternoon on the Saturday I saw the tagger, his handiwork had been painted over, creating that two-tone look so prevalent all over this city.

Several businesspeople in the area say crime is down so much from a couple of decades ago that they can take the tagging in stride, though they'd rather not have to. And they all praised how quickly the city's graffiti removal services respond.

Ed Jeffers, who owns property along Pico, says he's been in the neighborhood since 1974, when he was often afraid. "I wouldn't walk around the block," he said. "I thought I wouldn't make it."

These days, he says, he might confront a tagger. "I'm 6' 4" and 300 pounds. I don't think they're going to bother me."

Nick Babila, who owns Impact Auto Body on Pico, sees things as much better too. A decade ago, tagging wouldn't turn heads. The fact that people are bothered by it is progress, he says.

It may be progress, but it's only a start. Our neighborhood is about halfway between downtown and the beach, with great economic and ethnic diversity. It's an area with a few new cafes and antique shops, but also more liquor stores than any neighborhood needs, and the streets aren't kept as clean as in Hancock Park. If it often feels like a neighborhood coming into its own, it's also easy to see what a fragile process that can be. As fragile as a stream of paint from a $8 can.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-macvean-graffiti-20100517,0,93...

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Time

20100526 Iranian film-makers script political role

By: Massoumeh Torfeh

He missed the Cannes film festival while in solitary confinement on hunger strike in Evin prison, Iran. Jafar Panahi, the internationally acclaimed Iranian film director, was released on bail today. He went on hunger strike on 16 May to protest at his treatment and the accusations against him. He was arrested in February for allegedly making a film about the contested presidential elections of last June, which brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back to power.

Panahi is known for his social realism films and has won awards at the Venice and Berlin film festivals. While on hunger strike in prison, he was due to be acting as a judge at the Cannes film festival last week. His chair was left empty throughout this year's competition in protest at his incarceration.

Panahi's mentor, the Iranian film director, Abbas Kiarostami, called his arrest a tragedy. Speaking last week at a press conference in Cannes for his own film, Certified Copy, Kiarostami said "art is in prison" in Iran and condemned the "continued pressure" on film-makers. Referring to accusations made against Panahi's unfinished film, Kiarostami ridiculed the fact that in Iran "a film director has to go to prison for a film he has not made yet". Last year a travel ban was imposed on Panahi, who was accused of wearing green at a rally in favour of the green movement.

Apart from Panahi, who has received continuous international support, another film-maker, Mohammad Nourizad, is reported by the opposition Jaras website to still be on hunger strike. Having spent 70 days in solitary confinement in Evin prison, Nourizad is reported as having lost the sight in one eye due to repeated beatings. His wife's interviews demanding an explanation for the harsh treatment he has received in prison over the last five months have been reported by Jaras.

Nourizad supported the opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, but has spent most of his career as a documentary maker working with official media in the Islamic republic and supporting the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

He was a columnist in the hardline Keyhan newspaper and angered the regime by writing several letters to the supreme leader criticising the treatment of protesters. In his personal blog he asked the leader to side with the people and "renounce Ahmadinejad". Iranian film-makers and art students have written separate letters to the head of the judiciary, Sadeq Larijani, protesting at the arrest and aggressive treatment of Nourizad.

Cinema has, in the last decade, played an increasingly active political role in Iran. Most film and documentary makers, as well as TV serial producers, have used the smallest loophole in Iran's censorship to make socio-political protests. Panahi's Offside, which won the 2006 Berlin film festival's Silver Bear award, protested at women being unable to attend football matches; Circle, which won the Golden Lion as best film at the Venice film festival in 2000, was also highly critical of the treatment of women, and The White Balloon, which won a Camera d'Or at the Cannes film festival, circumvented the censor by speaking through children.

Bahman Ghobadi's No One Knows About Persian Cats portrayed the pressures on young musicians and pop groups banned in Iran; Manijeh Hekmat showed the horrors of female prison cells; Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's May Lady illustrated the difficulties for a woman in love in the Islamic Republic. She has pushed the limits of censorship in Iran by focusing on taboo subjects such as poverty, crime, prostitution, polygamy, divorce and illicit love.

Regarded as the leading contemporary female film director in Iran, Bani-Etemad was also a pioneer in supporting the green movement and putting her signature to most letters of complaint about the treatment of protesters in the months after the June presidential elections.

Another globally acclaimed film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, became the international spokesperson for Mousavi and has been actively speaking and writing in condemnation of the Islamic Republic's brutal methods against protesters over the last year. Several leading film-makers signed letters in support of Panahi condemning the treatment of their colleagues in Evin prison.

The relatively more open cultural atmosphere of the reform era, led by the former president, Mohammad Khatami, which allowed some space for many of these film-makers, turned sour when Ahmadinejad came to power five years ago. His hardline policies had little respect for international fame and disowned creativity and free speech in cinema and the arts. The establishment became increasingly angered by the fact that film-makers dared to confront the regime directly. For them, cinema and the arts had to be revolutionary and committed to serving Islam and the Islamic Republic.

However, their attempts at silencing cinema and the arts have so far been in vain. Iranian film-makers are receiving international acclaim and at home they are holding a prominent position on the screen – as well in the political sphere. Despite government pressure, Iranian cinema, and documentaries reflecting those basic difficulties of social and political life have become the outspoken voice and vision of the educated and the young in Iran.

• This article was amended on 25 May to correct the name of Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami

20100526 Cannes film festival 2010: a triumph of politics over art

The consensus seems to be that Cannes 2010 was far from a stellar year. But the competition produced a bewitching Palme d'Or winner, there were frequent gems elsewhere, and flashes of real social engagement from the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Lucy Walker

Cannes 2010 may have been a non-vintage year in many ways, but it yielded a glorious Palme d'Or winner in the form of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, an utterly beguiling film, bewitchingly mysterious and strange in his distinctive manner, and unselfconsciously yet unapologetically spiritual – a spirituality that the director quietly offers as an alternative to the belligerent nationalism and factious politics for which Thailand is now in the news.

t is a compassionate film that combines gentle comedy with fantasy and offers a transcendental vision of love, which manifests itself most vividly at the moment of our death. Its success may modify the somewhat cliched critical view of Asian cinema at Cannes as something affectless and opaque. After the successive triumphs of his last two films, Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century, this showed a film-maker whose imagination is at its strongest and most confident: his creative idiom pulses like a powerful heartbeat. After watching this movie, I was so swooningly captivated, I almost felt like going to live in some sort of tent near the director's home in Chiangmai in Thailand, a true believer, like one of the followers of Tolstoy encamped near his home at the beginning of the last century.

The film is loosely inspired by a pamphlet entitled A Man Who Can Recall Past Lives, which the director found in a monastery in north-east Thailand, about an old man called Uncle Boonmee who helped at the temple and told gentle tales of his past lives and past incarnations as humans and animals. Weerasethakul's movie imagines a widower called Boonmee, played by the non-professional Thanapat Saisaymar, who is suffering from a terminal disease and has come to the remote forests of his boyhood – the location, as he believes, of his past spirit lives – to die. But his memory of these past lives is not merely a case of earlier incarnations being presented as a kind of mystical "flashback", but his memory of those lives which are now lost to him: his dead wife and lost son. His encounter with these past lives is gently comic, strange, dream-like and deeply moving. I write about this film in more detail here.

The Grand Prix for Xavier Beauvois's Of Men and Gods was for me another very satisfying award: a fictionalised version of the true-life story from 1996 of French Cistercian monks being kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists from their monastery in Algeria and finally murdered in circumstances that have never been fully explained. Boldly and powerfully, Beauvois makes of this case a religious and Catholic parable, almost like TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, with the monks being progressively menaced by extremists, but refusing to leave, refusing to abandon their calling; yet declining to modify their respect for the traditions of the Qur'an, and reluctant to abandon the local people who have come to depend on them. Gradually, they make themselves ready for martyrdom. The final sequence has a delirious, inspirational quality, an extravagant and explicit reference to the last supper: the monks enjoy some unaccustomed red wine at their modest supper, as Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake plays – an almost Kubrickian flourish – and Beauvois's camera lingers on their careworn faces as they realise what must be in store for them all. Are they achieving something for which they have yearned throughout a lifetime of prayer: a state of grace? It is a very powerful movie, and I look forward to seeing it again when it is released in the UK.

I'm afraid I can't exactly praise the jury's decision to give the best actress prize to Juliette Binoche for her performance in Abbas Kiarostami's odd romantic adventure Certified Copy: she plays a gallery owner in Tuscany who strikes up an intense relationship with a visiting British author whom she has agreed to show around. Of course, Binoche is a wonderful performer, and appearing on the poster for this year's festival as she does, she is a virtual talismanic presence in Cannes. You don't expect anything less than a first-class contribution from Juliette Binoche, and that is what you get from her here. But I must frankly say that she is hobbled by the strange oddity of the film that she appears in, by the uneasy, uncertain quality of the dialogue – Kiarostami is working for the first time in English – and the fact that she has to act opposite William Shimell, an opera singer who here makes his debut as a film actor. Shimell gives of his best: he is obviously someone with presence and intelligence, and his performance was liked by many in Cannes. But I have to say I think he is returning to opera after this. The scene in which Binoche retreats to the ladies' room to get herself glammed up with lipstick and earrings was hugely praised by critics: I found this enthusiasm really quite baffling. Certified Copy was a semi-successful curiosity; Binoche's performance was semi-successful also. I would have preferred to see the best actress prize go to the Korean performer Youn Yuh-jung, playing the sinister housekeeper in Im Sang-soo's elegant suspense thriller The Housemaid.

The best actor prize was divided between Javier Bardem for Alejandro González Iñárritu's intense underworld drama Biutiful and to the young Italian Elio Germano for Daniele Luchetti's La Nostra Vita (Our Life). Again, I'm out of sympathy here. Biutiful is a madly over-the-top rhapsodic tragedy that piles on the woe. Bardem plays a street hustler in Barcelona who is running a crew of Senegalese illegals selling drugs and is also working with some Chinese wiseguys who have a whole warehouse cellar packed with illegals working in a sweatshop. Bardem's character has also the (genuine) gift of seeing dead people, and makes a few euros on the side contacting the departed for grieving relatives: he himself is dying of prostate cancer. He has access to huge hidden stashes of cash, but lives in poverty. We are persistently invited to see him as a sympathetic, flawed character with raw integrity, despite the fact that he is complicit in a horrendous event that occurs three-quarters of the way through the movie; he does not give himself up to the police, is not seen making amends in any other way and the movie never appears to regard him as guilty in any sense. It is an exasperating performance in a basically exasperating movie.

Elio Germano, in La Nostra Vita, is a dynamic, charismatic, endlessly watchable actor. He plays Claudio, a construction worker, happily married with two kids and a third on the way. Everything is great in his life, although he could do with a little more money. Then an awful thing happens and Claudio makes a decision to cover it up, and carry on with his modest life as best he can. It's not a bad film, though finally much more sentimental and lenient than the audience might expect from its shocking opening. Germano is great – it's not stretching things to compare him to the young De Niro in Mean Streets.

Mahamat Saleh Haroun won the jury prize for his excellent film A Screaming Man, which was thought by some in Cannes to be over-schematic, but whose directness and simplicity I found entirely compelling. In fact, I should have liked the best actor prize to go to Youssouf Djaoro, playing Adam, the sixtysomething pool attendant at a luxury hotel in Chad, whose son works alongside him. But when Adam loses his job, and is then pressured by the authorities to send his son off to war to fight insurgent rebels, Adam is put into a painful, complex situation.

I'm sorry to say that the jury gave the best director prize to Mathieu Amalric for his directing debut On Tour, an emotionally flat, not-very-well-acted-or-directed vanity project in which Amalric plays a former TV producer who is taking a troupe of neo-burlesque strippers from the US on a regional tour of his native France, and wondering whether to bring them to Paris, where he must confront his past and slay personal demons. I found this film boring, with a negligent, lazily extreme performance from Amalric himself. He is usually such a treat. Not this time. The directing prize should surely have gone to Mike Leigh, whose Another Year was one of the very best films in Cannes.

Lee Chang-dong won the best screenplay prize for his film Poetry, about a sixtysomething woman who has been told that she is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and conceives a passionate desire to write a poem about her life, before the powers of language and memory desert her utterly. It is, intermittently, an affecting film, though in my view clotted with plot strands that were clumsily over-dramatic and superfluous.

This was a year in which many felt that the competition list was upstaged by a very interesting Un Certain Regard section, dominated by the defiant glitter of Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialism, and by the polemics out of competition from Lucy Walker, with her anti-nuke documentary Countdown to Zero, and from Sabina Guzzanti with her brilliant attack on Berlusconi: Draquila – Italy Trembles. In competition, auteur heavy-hitters like Kiarostami and Loach produced only middling work. But there were gems like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Of Men and Gods and Another Year – all demand to be seen when they are released in Britain.

20100526 North Korean art causes stir in Vienna

By Bethany Bell BBC News, Vienna

20100526 ‘Political’ Art to Cheer

By: Jay Nordlinger

I just saw a thrilling picture, resulting from an excellent idea. You know about Orlando Zapata Tamayo, the Cuban prisoner of conscience who died in February after an 83-day hunger strike. Yes, 83 days. According to Yoani Sánchez, the famed blogger, Zapata’s death has rallied the opposition on the island. A Cuban-born artist who lives in New Jersey, Geandy Pavón, had the aforementioned excellent idea. He is taking Zapata’s picture and projecting it onto the façades of buildings. Just any buildings? No — buildings in the Free World that contain offices of the Cuban dictatorship. He has done this in New York (the Cuban mission to the U.N.). He has done it in Barcelona (the Cuban consulate there). And, on May 20, he did it in Washington, D.C. May 20 is the anniversary of Cuba’s independence from Spain.

He projected Zapata’s image onto the Cuban Interests Section, at 2630 16th St., N.W. This exercise, as Pavón says, “imposes the face of the victim upon the assassin, using light as an analogy of truth, reason, and justice.” For the picture I saw, go here. It must have been all the more thrilling in person. Usually, I’m opposed to stunts, and especially to stunt art. This, I find righteous and wonderful.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDhhOGU1NTMwNGUwNTc2MjEwZjg2NTZhMzU1YTkzNzE=

20100604 Foreign Policy: Listening To M.I.A's Music And Politics

by Charles Homans

In the much-discussed cover story of this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Lynn Hirschberg profiles M.I.A., née Maya Arulpragasam, the British-by-way-of-Sri-Lanka musician whose third album comes out later this summer. It's an interesting piece (even if its subject doesn't think so), not least because it's the first celebrity profile I've read that begins with a thorough parsing of Sri Lankan dissident politics. The subject comes up because a frequent touchstone in M.I.A.'s music is her father's resume: He was as a founder of the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS), a militant group with ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization that helped lay the groundwork for the modern Tamil statehood movement before being superseded by the more violent Tamil Tigers.

Although her father never actually had anything to do with the Tigers, M.I.A. championed the organization's cause (albeit sort of vaguely) throughout its guerrilla war with government forces in northern Sri Lanka, a war with few good guys. (By happenstance, M.I.A.'s own ascent to popularity over the course of her first two records happened mostly between the breakdown of peace talks between the Sri Lankan government and the Tigers in 2006 and the rebels' defeat in 2009.) Her support is a matter of considerable annoyance to activists concerned with bringing about some sort of lasting peace on the island. "It's very unfair when you condemn one side of this conflict," Ahilan Kadirgamar of the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum tells Hirschberg. "The Tigers were killing people, and the government was killing people. It was a brutal war, and M.I.A. had a role in putting the Tigers on the map. She doesn't seem to know the complexity of what these groups do."

Hirschberg mines this vein unsparingly — you know the knives are out when a writer pulls the old take-a-radical-artist-to-a-fancy-restaurant trick:

Unity holds no allure for Maya - she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. "I kind of want to be an outsider," she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. "I don't want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I'm a terrorist."

A whole genre of art is, by association, coming in for a drubbing here: the venerable agitprop tradition in which M.I.A. has positioned herself. In music, the legacy runs back through Public Enemy, who championed Louis Farrakhan, and the Clash, who called their classic 1980 album Sandinista!; elsewhere, you've got Warhol's Mao paintings, of course, and pretty much everything Jean Luc Godard has ever said. It's different from the standard political peregrinations of artists and celebrities in that the art is inextricable from the politics, and from their audaciousness — the Clash record would have sold somewhat worse if it had been called Social Democrat!

This is the line in the sand between the postmodern chilliness of M.I.A.'s radical politics and, say, the heartfelt socialism of Woody Guthrie — the aesthetic of conflict, rather than any particular policy ambition, is the point. To Hirschberg, it suggests an unflattering comparison:

Like a trained politician, [M.I.A.] stays on message. It's hard to know if she believes everything she says or if she knows that a loud noise will always attract a crowd.

I think this is a more damning indictment of politics than it is of M.I.A. — whose music is, all things considered, pretty great, if not quite up to the precedents of London Calling or It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Stitching an aesthetic out of politics is at the end of the day pretty harmless; assembling a politics out of aesthetics, not so much.

20100612 Martha Graham Dance Company's Political Dance Project: Old times feel like ours

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 11, 2010

NEW YORK -- What might a BP oil-spill dance look like? Or an I-was-gouged-by-Bernie-Madoff solo? The recession expression, in movement?

Maybe we'll never know. Maybe that's a good thing. But 80 years ago, when a financial crisis and an environmental disaster captured America's attention, modern dancers were among the leading chroniclers. They were the new mythmakers, turning sharecroppers, Okies and nameless urban drudges into tragic heroes, just as their counterparts in photography and folk song did.

Ripping from the headlines, in fact, empowered the field of modern dance, then in its infancy, and moved it out of the theoretical and into real life. That's still a good place for it, as the Martha Graham Dance Company demonstrated Wednesday night in its Political Dance Project, which looks at works of the 1920s and '30s by Graham and her contemporaries. The series of four programs continues at the Joyce Theater through Sunday, where the first shows have sold out and demand has been high for the remaining views of little-known reconstructions mixed in with Graham staples such as "Appalachian Spring."

Few choreographers today put politics onstage. In this post-postmodern era, the field has shied away from the provocations of the AIDS works of the 1980s and early 1990s, which was perhaps the last time dance wrapped itself around an issue. Individual dancemakers may take on topical subjects, as Doug Varone did in "Alchemy," inspired by the Daniel Pearl beheading, or as Paul Taylor's "Banquet of Vultures" crucified George W. Bush. But such works are rare in an art form that, broadly speaking, has settled comfortably into self-consciousness. Dance is mostly about dancing. But between the world wars, when this country was leveled by the Great Depression, and fascism was looming overseas, the activist women who were forging a new art form took up the common man as their muse.

* * *

Thus, on Wednesday's program of solos assembled under the title "Dance Is a Weapon," we saw a searing portrait of assembly-line slavery in "Time Is Money," from 1934. A voice-over and photographic montage introduced each of the works, placing them in the context of what was going on in the nation and the world at the time (a smart move). During a labor protest in Chicago, "50 workers are shot," the narrator intones. "Ten die.

"Jane Dudley made a dance."

Did she ever. "Time Is Money" is a psychological study of industrial deadening, a soul in rigor mortis while the body still twitches to the clock's demands. There's nothing self-aggrandizing in this work; in an extraordinarily captivating performance, Maurizio Nardi hinted at a factory worker's repetitions, the monotonous ticking away of his life, the silent anguish inside. At one point he hunches over, pumping one shoulder up and down like a piston; but that muscular vigor dwindles and weakens, until he's just circling a limp hand, watching as the power spins out of his body, out of his grasp. Adding to the innovations of this bit of bottled despair was the accompaniment: not music, but a spoken poem by Sol Funaroff, with deliciously vintage lines about "the bourgeois formulas for increased dividends." Actually, given our own financial crisis brought to us by Wall Street greed, that doesn't feel so vintage.

If dance can indeed be a weapon, this was the sharpest blade of the bunch.

In "Time Is Money" as in the others, simplicity was the hallmark. Eve Gentry's "Tenant of the Street" (1938), all humps and tilts, was like a line drawing come to life. (Never heard of Gentry? Pilates fans, she is your hero; the longtime disciple of Joseph Pilates helped formalize his method.) As bums multiplied throughout the Depression, they also became invisible; but Gentry's street urchin, in a magnetic performance by Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch, refuses to be ignored. She locks eyes with us in her slow, hunched progress across the stage. But along with the spare emotional focus and physical tension, what made this solo so arresting was its stylized abstraction. Gentry worked in bold, elegant deco lines, making visceral the lean loops and streamlining that energized the decorative arts of the 1930s. It was fascinating to see that style as a movement motif.

Other works had the sentimental appeal of period pieces, such as Isadora Duncan's 1924 "The Revolutionary," with the pounding piano chords of Scriabin's Etude, Op. 8, No. 12, and dancer Tadej Brdnik crumpling to the stage but shooting his fist in the air like a banner. There was more than a little overstatement in this piece that Duncan created for herself, but Brdnik's compact explosiveness sharpened the simple, repeated movements.

Sophie Maslow's 1941 "I Ain't Got No Home," part of her "Dust Bowl Ballads," responded to the devastation of the Plains brought on by the rise of agribusiness and ruinous dust storms that drove people off the land. Accompanied by Woody Guthrie's "I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore," this work was about the unbent spirit; in Lloyd Knight's rhythmic jig and airy jumps you read the will to carry on. But that man doesn't exist anymore, if he ever did; this piece, sweet-tempered as it was, felt like a fairy tale of Americana.

Graham's "Panorama" (1935), an impressive sweep of crowd formations featuring dance students, and her "Sketches From 'Chronicle' " (1936), gave a good sense of why she became the dominant modern-dance voice of the time and why Dudley, Maslow, Gentry and others are known mostly to dance historians today. Graham was the consummate showman, a supreme commander whose group works crested in wave after wave, spilling forth images of strength, fury and the conquering resolution of an army of goddesses. Of course, her works are brilliantly crafted, and the dance vocabulary she created is unparalleled. (And the Graham company has never looked better in it.) But this program also spotlighted Graham's grasp of the times and how she turned anxiety and fearfulness into power.

It's clear in "Appalachian Spring," the familiar 1944 paean to the frontier, which was given a new context in this program of political dance. As the company's artistic director, Janet Eilber, told the audience before the curtain went up, it was intended by Graham and her musical collaborator, Aaron Copland, as their contribution to the war effort, to lifting the nation's spirits. There is no finer distillation of the country's courage and independence, and it felt all the more impassioned Wednesday, with Blakeley White-McGuire as the Bride, Samuel Pott as the Husbandman, Nardi as the Revivalist and Katherine Crockett's radiant Pioneering Woman.

But there's another political statement embedded in this series. It is Eilber's declaration of a new mission for her company -- as a living museum.

A museum! You could hardly make a more incendiary claim in the dance field. Being devoted to old work is not fashionable. What you typically hear from dance companies whose founders have died but that are still carrying on, is: We're not a museum. By which they mean, don't think of us as display space for relics. We'll still have premieres!

So will the Graham company. Tuesday's opening of this series featured a theatrical piece by Anne Bogart called "American Document," a premiere that reinvents Graham's 1938 work of the same name with the use of actors, poetry and blogs from U.S. troops in Iraq.

"We feel the field of modern dance in general needs to come together to embrace its legacy, and we're demonstrating that," Eilber said in an interview this week. "And to give a home to these endangered works." In a field that has been tragically negligent of its past, that is a radical notion. As "Dance Is a Weapon" proved, radical notions still have legs.

20100615 Gov. Deval Patrick embraces politics of art

By Jim Sullivan
Sunday, June 13, 2010

“I’ve never been invited to things like this, to meet a politician,” said Damon Krukowksi, half of the indie rock duo Damon & Naomi, Friday night. “I always felt we came last, not just as artists, but as self-employed people.”

Krukowksi and partner Naomi Yang were among 120 independent musicians, nonprofit workers and band managers at Q Division Recording Studios in Somerville gathered to dine, drink and listen to Gov. Deval Patrick speak.

Patrick, who spoke for 15 minutes and took questions for another 35, referenced his father right away. Laurdine “Pat” Patrick played saxophone for the avant-garde jazz legend Sun Ra for three decades.

He said he didn’t possess his dad’s musical talent, but stated, “I am one of us.”

Patrick said he considered the arts as not just a “nice thing on the side. I think of it as how we complete our community.”

Patrick spoke about finding solutions for those in the arts such as spreading the word about what they create and securing affordable health care.

He suggested that one answer for arts funding might be to approach owners of the four major sports teams. He said he knew three of those owners and said they were looking for investments.

“We’ve got a lot of the bones and a lot of the flesh,” Patrick said, of a diverse Boston arts scene, “but how do we organize it and promote it?”

Mia Howard, marketing manger at Boston Lyric Opera, said, “For him to stand up and say ‘Art was part of my life and continues to be’ is important.”

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20100615 VIDEO! Hip-hop and politics have a long history behind the mic

By David A. Love of TheGrio.com

This weekend one of hip-hop's hottest acts, Drake, lent his talent to protest offshore drilling. On Sunday, the 23-year-old rapper performed at the 'Stop The Offshore Drilling" rally at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C.

In May, hip-hop veteran Talib Kweli released a single about another hot political topic. It's called 'Papers Please' -- and it voices his opposition to Arizona's new immigration law.

Hip-hop and politics have been together for a long time, and there are no signs the two will break apart soon. Although there were the naysayers who once dismissed hip-hop as a fad and predicted its untimely demise, this is an art form, a culture, and a political movement that is not going away.

Starting out as the CNN of the ghetto, and a medium to express the hopes and frustrations of a disenfranchised community, hip-hop went from knocking on the door of the mainstream to becoming the mainstream. And over the years, hip-hop evolved from hating the president--and vice versa--to dining with the president. Who would have imagined just a few years ago that the president would have hip-hop on his iPod, or even own an iPod for that matter?

Black Music Month is a perfect time to examine the politics of hip-hop--and where it's going next.

"Hip-hop had a long political engagement; hip-hop almost starts as a political movement," says journalist and cultural critic Touré. "People from the street need a voice--we have no voice. So we have to have something to say."

Touré believes that hip-hop speaks up for the underdog. "And it evolves into people like Chuck D who are like shadow-senators for a group of people who felt voiceless and could go on Nightline or could go on other shows or could speak back to Arizona when they didn't want to do the MLK holiday and be a national bullhorn saying 'this is wrong'," he said.

"Black people throughout the African Diaspora tend to be an oppressed people. We have always held our artists, musicians, and writers accountable for using their voice to uplift and educate, especially in times of turmoil," says hip hop artist Giovanni "G." Turner, who is also president and in-house counsel of RAHM Nation Recordings, LLC, and a University of Miami lecturer of English.

"We saw this most recently during the Haitian earthquake. Jay-Z, whom by no one's account, not even his own, is a 'political' rapper, but when the black community was stricken with tragedy, we all turned to him. In fact, not only was it expected he issue a statement, record a commemorative song, and donate money, I argue he would have been ostracized had he remained silent."

"Everything is political," says Russell Simmons, co-founder of Def Jam and the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. The hip-hop community, according to Simmons, "speaks to the next America and reminds them of what's important, so that's political." Simmons also believes hip-hop is a very progressive community that believes in giving to others and uplifting people from poverty. These days, according to the hip-hop trailblazer, every hip-hop artist seems to be involved in philanthropy: "You can't name the politicians who have charities, they're on one hand, you can name them. But every rapper has a charity."

The Origins of Hip-Hop

Long before hip-hop, African culture had its political truth-tellers. In West Africa, the griot was the storyteller, the individual who transmitted oral history to the community, informed the people of current events and provided political commentary. From the late 1960s, the prototypes and founders of hip-hop certainly served this role.

For example, the Last Poets was a group of spoken word artists and musicians with a strong black nationalist orientation and highly political messages. With conscience-raising poems like "Ni***rs are Scared of Revolution" and "When the Revolution Comes," the Last Poets helped paved the way for the hip-hop movement to come. Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, Gil Scott-Heron paved the way for a future generation with his activist lyrics, in songs such as "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Winter In America."

Music becomes particularly political when it is linked with activist movements, and hip-hop is no exception.

"Soul music is more often going to talk about love and relationships and that sort of thing, hip-hop is more likely to talk about political issues whether it's 'I have a problem with the government'," Touré said.

"Most of the music, no matter what genre we're talking about from jazz to hip-hop, is actually apolitical. The music becomes political if there's something political happening in the community," says Kevin Powell, a political activist, writer, and entrepreneur and candidate for Congress. "I listen to all kinds of music and you gotta understand it's not like hip-hop was political for a long period of time. This is just a couple of years that we're talking about. Most American music has always been apolitical, it's just been pop stuff," he adds.

"Let's be honest. In the heyday of jazz in the 1920s, people were talking about the cakewalk. It was a dance, it had nothing to do with the political climate of the times. So when Billie Holiday, 10 years later, made a song like 'Strange Fruit,' people were like 'Oh my God, I can't believe she made a song like that'," says Powell.

The Reagan years were hard times for African-Americans, Latinos and poor people in general. The harsh conditions in these communities--with the government's war on drugs waged simultaneously with a war on the poor--provided an incubator for hip-hop to emerge and flourish. "In the 1980s, we had the Bush-Reagan era, we had crack cocaine, we had all these different things going on so it started making its way into the music," Powell says.

"Well, you know I think in many ways Reagan, the conditions in America at that time, Reaganomics, were a part of the reason why hip-hop was founded in the first place because it did come out of these deplorable conditions in the South Bronx where people were disenfranchised, didn't have jobs, didn't have the ability to provide for themselves," says AllHipHop.com founder Chuck 'Jigsaw' Creekmur. "It provided kids with something to do when they otherwise would be fighting. It provided them with a voice when there was no voice and it really spawned this movement out of just pure negativity, and I'd
like to give Reagan a little credit to that."

The Eighties

The 1980s gave birth to such overtly political songs as "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. This was a song that resonated with people who lived in hard times, because it accurately and poignantly articulated the stresses of urban life. "If you look at 'The Message'--basically the second or third hip-hop single to blow up or come out--that's a very political song," says Touré.

Kevin Powell makes the point that the hip-hop community organizing around politics is not a new phenomenon, nor did it begin with the Obama presidential campaign.

"So there was a wave of us who were doing work around racism, around the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa who were already combining hip-hop and politics. We were 18, 19, 20 years old. In fact, here in New York City, right on 125th street we'd have these big outdoor concerts where we'd have the biggest rappers of the day -- LL Cool J, Heavy D and the Boys, Big Daddy Kane, you name it."

Rappers, rockers and other musicians banded together for the famed "Sun City: Artists United Against Apartheid" album in 1986. Artists participating in the album boycotted Sun City, an infamous luxury resort complex in one of the most repressed regions in apartheid-era South Africa. Powell laments that America has not had a real political movement since the apartheid movement of the eighties.

Perhaps the most well-known and influential political rap group of the 1980s was Public Enemy. With their hard-hitting, in-your-face lyrics, powerful beats and the forceful voice of the group's front man Chuck D, Public Enemy was the soundtrack for a conscious and vigilant hip-hop generation.

"First of all, Public Enemy is forever linked to politics and hip-hop," said AllHipHop's Creekmur. "They have so many songs, it's just ridiculous. Even hardcore fans like myself who remember their first album, there were jewels and gems in that album, too. But then it was their second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back where they really put the flag for that movement. So they have songs like 'Fight the Power' which I think is the ultimate anthem for empowering the youth, but they also have songs like 'By the Time I Get To Arizona,' which is, ironically, on the table now in some ways with the immigration issue, but back then it was the MLK holiday which was being in dispute."

However, Public Enemy did not stand alone in their genre. As Creekmur emphasizes, there were other artists who made their mark: "Public Enemy is definitely at the forefront, but there's many others. There's KRS-One, Poor Righteous Teachers, even artists like Ice Cube and early N.W.A.They were all political in one way or another."

And there were groups such as X-Clan that provided their listeners with an education in every song. "Listening to X-Clan was like going to political science class," says Touré. "But hip-hop comes from so many angles. There's the politicized talk; there's the discussion of what happens with crack in our communities. So many Nas songs have a political message just woven into a lyric -- the song may not be about politics but he's dropping science in every verse."

The Police

With its critique of those in power and its challenge to authority, hip-hop provides numerous commentaries on police brutality and official government misconduct and corruption. This is no surprise to the residents of black and brown communities, who for years have been subjected to heavy-handed law enforcement tactics, brutal police beatings and shootings, and deaths in police custody. Historically, police who patrolled communities of color were the occupying force, not there to protect and serve, but to control and contain.

Back in the 1960s, the Black Panthers organized to combat police brutality in their neighborhoods. And Malcolm X spoke of the police "exercising Gestapo tactics, stopping any black man who is on the sidewalk, whether he is guilty or whether he is innocent...As long as he is black and a member of the Negro community, the public thinks that the white policeman is justified in going in there and trampling on that man's civil rights and on that man's human rights."

Armed with contemporary examples of police beating, shooting and killing black men--in the form of Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima and others--hip-hop took the righteous indignation embodied in Malcolm's statement. And the result--angry and unfiltered--was a form of truth-telling about racist cops unintended for mixed company.

"You know if you live in the hood, the police are constantly there, constantly attacking you, constantly mistreating you," says Touré. "And it's an enemy that everybody can get behind. Nobody's going to stand up and say 'Hey, the police actually saved me, when I was getting mugged or when I was wronged, they came and helped me'...Every black person has either been somewhat mistreated by the police or knows someone who's been mistreated by the police."

Censorship

So-called controversial hip-hop has long been the target of censorship. For example, Ice-T and his group Body Count created a firestorm of controversy with their 1992 song "Cop Killer." The song, which made references to then-LAPD police chief Daryl Gates and Rodney King, a black motorist who was beaten by LAPD officers. Shortly after the song was released, the officers who beat King were acquitted, which led to riots erupting in South Central Los Angeles.

"Cop Killer" received criticism from then-President George H.W. Bush, Vice-president Dan Quayle, and Tipper Gore of the Parents Music Resource Center. Meanwhile, black activist C. Delores Tucker teamed up with conservative William Bennett to fight what they viewed as the unhealthy role of violence, sex and misogyny in rap lyrics. And Rev. Calvin Butts of New York was prompted to bulldoze hundreds of CDs by artists such as N.W.A. and 2 Live Crew due to their violent and sexually explicit lyrics.

Was this a case of some hip-hop lyrics simply going too far? Or was this an example of smug, self-righteous morality police dictating their values to everyone else, as they attempted to get a piece of the action for themselves? Perhaps it is all in the eye of the beholder. There is no question, though, that history is told from the vantage point of the conquerors. And while hip-hop's obituary was prematurely read countless times, hip-hop still stands.

Women in Hip-Hop

Women have created a legacy in political hip-hop, although the music scene often appears male-dominated.

"They are definitely a part of the political discourse that we are having but unfortunately I think because hip-hop is a such a male dominant genre they have been overlooked in many ways," says Creekmur.  "But if you're talking about political dialogue in rap, of course Queen Latifah's "UNITY" is gonna come up and even MC Lyte's 'Georgy Porgy.'"

Sister Souljah was a woman in hip-hop who became very political, and whose words were exploited by politicians for political gain. Following the 1992 Los Angeles riots, she was quoted by the Washington Post as saying "If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" At a speech at Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton repudiated Sister Souljah's statement, comparing her to the white racist klansman David Duke.

And so, the man who black people once considered America's first black president--before the real first black president, that is--"beat up" on a black woman for political gain, or at least that was the perception. This is where America got the infamously loaded term "Sister Souljah moment."

Partying vs. Politics

While some hip-hop artists are overtly and consistently political, others have managed to bridge the partying side with the political side. A prime example is Tupac Shakur.

"First of all, Tupac is the son of a Black Panther, and I don't think we can ever get away from that," says Creekmur. "Afeni Shakur is an infamous black panther, and his stepfather is a black panther as well. So those are roots that go deep."

At the same time, Creekmur argues, Tupac was a 70s baby who was raised in the 1980s and 1990s, when hip-hop was born. "I think that the thing with Tupac is that he was able to speak to what was really going on...He was a great unifier for different sides of the community; the party side, but also the poignant and thoughtful side, and the political side. And we should never forget that Tupac raised issues with the black community, as well as the community at large."

Touré reflects on the different ways in which artists convey political messages in hip-hop. "Lauryn had a bunch of songs. 'Miseducation' talks about problems with the educational system. Kanye's doing that but more in a comical way. The Roots will give you some political messages but again it's woven in, Nas will give you some. He just did an album - 'Hip Hop is Dead' - and he has 'Don't Eat Fried Chicken.'"

Creekmur of AllHipHop.com also believes that some hip-hop artists can capitalize on the lack of a message in much of the music today. "Talib and Common are two great examples of artists who definitely talk about other things...I think that people are definitely are prone to gravitate to people, to rappers who are giving them something they're looking for."

Mixed Successes of Hip-Hop and Politics

Some of hip-hop's attempts at politics made important statements, but fell short of their promise. For example, in 2004 Sean "P. Diddy" Combs spearheaded a national "Vote or Die" campaign -- but and in the end, did not influence that year's election, as Touré argues.

"Was there a significant difference in the number of young black people that turned out? The answer is No," Touré says. "It did not have a significant impact on getting young black people to the polls."

Other times, hip-hop has the ability to define a moment in history and, in a simple yet profound way, say what others were thinking all along.

In a moment of clarity, following Hurricane Katrina, Kanye West said on national television that then-president Bush doesn't like black people. And while his message was not perfect in its delivery, the message was powerful, says Touré: "Seeing black people on the roof of houses, pleading to be helped. Seeing black people taking over the Superdome and that becoming just a lost land where they were sort of forgotten, people dying in the streets, as we saw. That was extraordinarily painful for black America and it definitely felt like the country does not care about us."

A Hip-Hop President?

Hip-hop has come full circle in terms of its political clout. Presidents once regarded hip-hop and its standard-bearers with contempt. But now, the president is young, African-American, and arguably a member of the hip-hop generation.

Obama has many supporters in the hip-hop community such as Will.I.Am, Ludacris and Jay-Z. The president invited Jay-Z to the White House, and even imitated the artist's trademark move of dusting off his shoulder. Who could have imagined this turn of events five years ago?

"The election for President Obama came at an opportune time for a number of reasons," says Fred Mwangaguhunga of MediaTakeOut.com. "He's universally respected, adored and so he's gonna be a topic of conversation amongst black people among hip-hop artists and so that conversation because he happens to be a politician is gonna invariably introduce elements of politics into hip hop so I think it's a great thing it's a great introduction or reintroduction of politics into hip hop."

Others believe there is more distance between Barack Obama and hip-hop. "I can't say that Barack is the hip-hop president. Chuck D is the hip-hop president," says AllHipHop.com's Creekmur. " I think if we had a president who was truly hip-hop then I think a lot would be different. Barack is the President of the United States of America therefore he has to conduct himself and govern accordingly...if he was the Hip-Hop President, so much would be different right now...but with that said, I think that people are so enamored by Barack...you know when he dust his shoulder off, we got that. We knew he was talkin' about Jay-Z...I don't know if the audience he was in front of got that."

"Barack Obama's presidential campaign was not a movement. It was a series of events, as Danny Glover said, that people got excited...got excited about so we all came together," Kevin Powell believes. "If it was a movement then why, one year later, did you have so few people come and vote for the (New York City) mayoral election? That wasn't a movement. So that's why the music is the way it is because the music is reflective of what's going on in society which has been a serious dumbing down in our country over the last 15 years or so."

Where Do We Go from Here?

The Hip-hop movement has influenced domestic U.S politics, but it has changed the world as well. But where is it headed? Will it remain politically relevant and vibrant? "I've been all over this country, been overseas, interacting with folks about hip-hop. You begin to realize that this is a global culture. It may have been created by African-American, West Indian, Puerto Rican young people in New York City but it belongs to everybody now," says Kevin Powell. "As Dead Prez says 'this is bigger than hip-hop'. This is about our communities; this is about this country and the future of this world." Yet Powell laments that hip-hop culture has died at the hands of the industry. "You would think that all that young people of color do is dance in videos and swing from poles and play basketball...that's unacceptable. So what the hip-hop industry has done has ultimately destroyed hip-hop the culture...which is what I represent, what I come from- there's two distinct differences. The culture is about all kinds of possibilities. What the industry has become is this is all you can be, that's unacceptable."

Touré believes that while hip-hop was very political in the 80s, and less so in the 90s and 2000s, it is now less political than ever, and getting worse. "Hip-hop is not working with the same political spine that it was in past decades because there are a lot of people who are buying the music who aren't looking for that so they're trying to serve those consumers. For some reason we're producing fewer rappers who are concerned with that kind of thing. The more you get away from the grassroots hip-hop which was as a political gesture...the more likely you are going to get away from making a political gesture with your music."

Chuck Creekmur thinks hip-hop is in a different space today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Artists and rappers have a completely different state of mind these days, and people are not as political because they are inundated with the stresses of a 24/7 news cycle, and are looking for an escape. Nevertheless, he still thinks politics is important. "People absolutely are still politicized in hip-hop...the BP oil spill is a perfect example...I mean we have people transmitting messages quoting the BP CEO, holding him accountable...the company accountable...in a way that you don't need a..."F BP!" you don't need that anthem anymore because people already feel that way and they transmit it in that way..."

Concerning the future of hip-hop, Giovanni Turner provides some sound advice by urging artists to strike a balance between their music and their message: "Ohene [hip hop/fusion jazz artist and co-founder of RAHM Nation Recordings, LLC] and I have since its inception billed RAHM Nation Recordings as label that would further the movement as well as the music. If the art does not continue to evolve, to grow in relevance and popularity, the message is practically meaningless," Turner suggests. "So many so-called political emcees invested their whole careers in calling for the metaphorical assassination of the president. Now that Barack Obama is president, these emcees have nothing to rap about and no lyrical skill back upon which to fall. They failed to invest in the craft. The artists that stand the test of time dedicate themselves to addressing the plight of their community and mastering their art."

For more on the hip-hop and politics series from theGrio click here and for more from AllHipHop.com click here http://www.allhiphop.com/stories/editorial/archive/2010/06/15/22267518.aspx

20100628 Armajani's distinguished - for mix of art, poetry and politics

photo by: Kimberly Smith, Dml - Ajc Staff Star Tribune

20100628 Robert Redford wants artists to push government

Photo by: Rob Carr

By BRETT ZONGKER, Associated Press Writer

Associated Press June 25, 2010 02:13 PM Copyright Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Friday, June 25, 2010

20100711 Moscow art curators await fate as trial over 'insulting' exhibition nears end

(Yuri Samodurov and human rights activists outside a courthouse during a hearing of his case in Moscow. Photograph: Ivan Sekretarev/AP)

By Tom Parfitt (Moscow)

A judge in Moscow could send two prominent art curators to jail tomorrow as a 14-month trial that has provoked fears of rising intolerance and attempts at censorship in Russia comes to an end.

Prosecutors charged Yuri Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev with fomenting ethnic and religious hatred and "insulting human dignity" for organising an exhibition in 2007 titled Forbidden Art.

The exhibition, which was held at Moscow's Sakharov Museum named after the Soviet-era dissident, featured several doctored images of Jesus. In one, his head was replaced with an Order of Lenin medal and in another he was depicted as Mickey Mouse.

Samodurov, a former director of the museum, and Yerofeyev, a former head of contemporary art at the State Tretyakov Gallery face up to five years in prison if convicted.

The exhibition was designed to highlight censorship and included many exhibits that had been banned from display at other art shows the previous year.

The defendants say their prosecution reveals a worrying trend of growing nationalist sentiment and the Russian Orthodox Church – which has called for the two men to be punished – meddling in cultural matters.

"This is a political case, which has nothing to do with democratic justice," Yerofeyev said. "This conflict has more profound and complex roots. The judge is experiencing very large state and church pressure."

A group of artists and rights activists sent an open letter to Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, earlier this month calling for the charges to be dropped.

The Orthodox Church has experienced a revival under prime minister and former president, Vladimir Putin, who last week spoke of its "enormous" role in "restoring the common Russian motherland".

Officials often turn a blind eye to conservative patriotic groups, whose members have beaten gay activists and attacked other art exhibits.

Samodurov was fined 100,000 roubles (£2,000) in 2005 for holding an exhibition called Caution! Religion! at the Sakharov Museum which included a Coca-Cola logo with Jesus's face shown next to it, with the words: "This is my blood". Charges were dropped against vandals who sprayed "blasphemy" on some of the exhibits.

Some observers expect a soft sentence in the current trial because Russia's culture minister, Alexander Avdeyev, said last month that he disapproved of the prosecution.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/11/moscow-art-curators-face-jail

20100717 Don't think it's graffiti

(Street artist Barry McGee’s graffiti-like mural covers nearly the entire side of the California Theater building along Third Avenue in downtown San Diego . The work, one of two huge murals on the abandoned building, is part of the exhibition “Viva La Revolucion: A Dialogue With the Urban Landscape” on view both inside and beyond the walls of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through Jan. 2.)

Don't think it's graffiti

San Diego’s urban landscape is the canvas in the first major American museum showcase for street art

By James Chute

, UNION-TRIBUNE STAF WRITER

Originally published July 17, 2010 at 3:11 p.m., updated July 17, 2010 at 3:40 p.m.

Most of the recent attention directed toward downtown’s California Theatre is focused on Barry McGee’s two huge, graffiti-inspired murals commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. But if you look a little closer, on one of the walls at the corner of Fourth Avenue and C Street, you’ll see a small mosaic replicating one of the characters from the archetypical “Space Invader” video game. Also commissioned by the museum, the French artist Invader has located them throughout San Diego, just as he has done all over the world in cities such as Paris , Amsterdam, Vienna and Los Angeles.

“It changes the way you relate to the city,” said Lucia Sanromán, the museum’s associate curator, during a stroll along C Street. “It makes it a more intimate environment where you have these moments (when you spot an Invader) that are only yours.”

It is no longer a place where every element is tightly controlled by the city’s power structure or the businesses that support and control it, she explained. “It is now your city, where you can build whatever narrative you want from this really small moment of recognition.”

(Shepard Fairey and his team work on his urban art piece on Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. One of the ironies Fairey copes with is that his artwork that challenges our consumer-driven society has itself generated commercial demand for his work.)

For the next several months, there will be opportunities for moments small and large as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego will be installing works by street artists like McGee and Invader throughout the city and devoting its downtown Jacobs galleries to the first major American museum exhibition devoted to street and street-inspired art: “Viva La Revolución: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape.”

During the course of the show, which opens today and continues through Jan. 2, the museum will be installing a number of public works in addition to McGee’s murals and the Invader installation. The 20 artists/collectives represented in public places and in the galleries encompass a who’s who of the street art. They include the genre’s superstar, Shepard Fairey, whose claim to fame includes the ubiquitous Obey Giant posters, the Obama “Hope” poster, and his arrest in Boston last year (on a warrant for tagginig property with graffiti) before the opening of a solo show of his work at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

(Photo by Earnie Grafton: Atop scaffolding, Pablo Piedade, an assistant to street artist “Vhils,” works on a piece for “Viva La Revolucion.”)

The show also features the genre’s fastest rising star, Mark Bradford, who in two years went from being a beauty shop operator to winning a 2009 MacArthur “genius” Grant. Also participating are William Cordova, JR, Ryan McGinness, David Ellis, Swoon and Dr. Lakra, among others. Some are inspired by the urban environment and incorporate urban and pop culture elements into their art while others literally make art out in the streets. Many of them do both.

“As soon as you go outside your domain with an exhibition like this, you take on a lot of risks and potential rewards,” said Hugh M. Davies, the museum’s director. “I mean, the payoff could be great if people embrace it and the mayor says we’ve improved the quality of life in San Diego through commissioning these new pieces. Then it’s a home run. If the mayor says, ‘Who the hell is responsible for this graffiti?’ we’ll pull back into our walls.

“But I am really proud we’re the first (American) museum to do an international street art show of this scale and scope.”

20100721 Russia's Forbidden Art

 

20100819 Hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean could be real contender for Haitian presidency

20100905 Art and Politics a Potent Mix

By: Andrew Taylor

How ironic that the career of the Arts Minister, Virginia Judge, suffered collateral damage the day after she opened White Rabbit Gallery's third exhibition of contemporary Chinese art,The Big Bang.

Wang Zhiyuan's Thrown to the Wind, a three-storey tower of plastic containers that spirals towards the roof of the gallery in Chippendale, dwarfed guests as they gathered to hear Judge praise the show last Thursday, which features the work of 40 artists from the collection of Judith Neilson, wife of the billionaire fund manager Kerr Neilson.

Chinese consulate officials also wandered around, no doubt impressed by Ai Weiwei's 500-kilogram pile of individually painted porcelain sunflower seeds. The artist, who was beaten by Chinese police last year and later had surgery for a cerebral haemorrhage, is not afraid of politics.

“Art is connected to our lives," he said. "Our lives are political, so it becomes political.”

The show also includes exiledMy Identity, by the Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso, four photos of him in Tibetan, Chinese, Indian and English settings. The third photo features the Dalai Lama, which led to its ban in the Middle Kingdom.

The gallery's manager, Paris Neilson, said Chinese authorities had cracked down on artists in the past six months.

20100906 Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Paul Conrad dies at 86

By Matt Schudel

20100907 Where would Palestinian art be without politics?

source: AP 

Palestinian street artists argue that the PLO rhetoric of putting Palestine before the Palestinian people has infused itself into local art.

Many cities in the West Bank are well known for their graffiti. The success of internationally recognized street artists like Banksy, Sam3 and Blu have helped promote this growing trend.

The motives behind Palestinian graffiti are expressly political. Nearly all artwork is outwardly dissenting and oppositional. The inherently political objective of Palestinian graffiti can be explained by the historical structure from which it developed.

Faris Arouri, 28, is a member of the Palestinian Peace & Youth Forum (PPYF). His brainchild, the "Send a Message" project was featured in Time Magazine, CNN and Haaretz last year.

 According to Faris and most scholars, Palestinian graffiti has undeniable political origins. “When street art was developed, it was mostly for political reasons. It is impossible to take it out of its context," Faris says, referring to the graffiti of the first intifada, when it served a broadly communicative purpose. Resistance groups utilized graffiti as a political canvas, detailing impending strikes, rallies, and general messages of defiance. Political groups also used graffiti to mobilize the population and persuade them to support the resistance.

 Majd Abdel Hamid, 22, is a Palestinian artist and graduate of the International Art Academy of Palestine and the Malmo Art Academy in Sweden. He argues that Palestinian street art has always retained its political focus: “The Western development of graffiti, particularly in New York, was a reaction to urbanizing. It was an individual act. Here it is collective. You don’t have famous Palestinian graffiti artists signing their names. It’s an anonymous act”.

The collective culture of graffiti is very much a symptom of its unified political nature. It avoids the culture of competition more symptomatic of Western scenes, in which artists vie for individual fame and aesthetic credit.

“When you have this politically charged conflict, the aesthetics of street art are never the main factor. It’s mostly about the conflict, the Palestinians, and the occupation," Majd explains.

According to both Faris and Majd, the dissident voice of Palestinian graffiti has its real origins in the establishment of the PLO and its general strategy for resistance. This strategy, which has since then become the national rhetoric, has prevented Palestinian graffiti from developing its own cultural, social and aesthetic mores, and has consequently thwarted the expansion of cultural development in a more general sense.

Faris argues that some time after the establishment of the PLO, the national focus shifted from individual human beings to the cause: “The slogan which I am always fighting against is ‘I am willing to die for Palestine.' You shouldn’t want to die for Palestine, you should want to live for Palestine. What is more important, the place or the human being? Is it the society or the actual land?"

"When Yasser Arafat first entered Palestine, instead of kissing a Palestinian child, he kissed the soil," Faris continues. "The soil is not the sacred part, it is the people that matter."

“The slogan of the Zionist movement was ‘return and build’. The Palestinian slogan was to ‘return and enjoy.’ People have come to believe that once the conflict ends, everything else ends. You don’t have a struggle for development, for civil rights, for human rights, for a proper environment. The whole environmental issue in Palestine is nonexistent. The entire mentality of the Palestinian people has been framed into…getting an independent Palestinian state,” he says.

According to Faris, the PLO formed a national rhetoric and an identity encircled by conflict. The effect this had on art is carefully described by Fatima Abdul Karim, another PPYF member: “There is no gray area in Palestinian art. There is either the victimized image or the image of a hero."

The political narrative promoted by the PLO translated every aspect of life into political themes. As an artist, this is something Majd is also acutely aware of: “Palestinian art in general was also preoccupied with the fact that there was an occupation. Art's function was to tell Palestinians that we exist,” he says.

Majd argues that, in becoming so political, Palestinian graffiti, and art in general, has missed out on a lot. He argues for the necessity of self-criticism in art movements, and in society in general: “Coming closer to a Palestinian state, there are many social aspects that art has to criticize, question and talk about. We have to tackle social aspects. For any type of development you have to criticize your own society. Whether you are occupied or not occupied, artwork is not merely and strictly political; to just repeat the Palestinian rhetoric is damaging.”

Last month, Majd participated in a video conference between Paris and Gaza. The focus of the meeting was Palestinian art, and what making art in such a context really meant. During the meeting, a theoretical question was posed: if, one morning, Israel and the occupation were gone, then where would this leave Palestinian art, literature film and cinema? The question sought to examine where Palestinian art could be without its politics.

Majd argues that occupied people tend to rank their socio-political agendas in order of importance. He laments this strategy: “It simply doesn’t work like that, its not simple mathematics- you have to work on both sides. We don’t have to work all our lives saying we need to get liberated - we have to have differences in order to develop independence.” For Majd, the question of how the Palestinians are going to define themselves is crucially important. And to do this, he argues, they must examine themselves.

Indeed Faris, Majd and Fatima all argue that the development of graffiti culture requires self-criticism. By placing this lack of identity so deep within the political and historical context of the Palestinians, they also acknowledge the difficulties which artists, writers, poets, filmmakers and cartoonists all face.

There are however, some aspects of Palestinian graffiti and art which do have their own extra social dimensions, however small they may be. In Gaza. for example, when somebody goes to the Hajj, often ‘welcome home’ slogans will be graffitied onto the walls. In the West Bank, a small group of feminist artists has emerged, which tackles women's issues in a Muslim society. And there is also an ongoing project called Picasso in Palestine, initiated by Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani, which aims is to bring a Picasso masterpiece from the Van Abbemuseaum in Eindhoven to the Palestinian people. The piece would be the first of its kind to be on display in Palestine.

Fatima says: “I am very much in love with the Picasso Project. The point is about what Palestine would be without occupation - with their own museums and sets of procedures." This vision, shared also by Faris and Majd, is of a Palestine with identity, richly self-critical and thoroughly self-involved.

20100908 Noises off: Playing politics can still be seriously dramatic

Entertainment and engagement don't need to be mutually exclusive, theatre bloggers argue

(Photograph: Tristram Kenton)

Are you bored by the idea of politics in theatre? Many people seem to be. Even Athol Fugard, in a recent interview with the Guardian, appeared to contrast theatre that aimed to be political and that which aimed to entertain. He argued that writers were increasingly being pressured to write for audiences that only had "attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts".

But do these two elements of politics and entertainment have to be mutually exclusive? Of course not. Isaac Butler of the Parabasis blogmakes this point in response to Emma Adams's blog on this site last week, writing that "the most successful works of political art also function as quality pieces of entertainment (or are very short)". He goes on to cite a whole range of plays that prove his point – from Beckett's Catastrophe and Pinter's One for the Road to Tony Kushner's Angels in America – before adding that he has "recently gotten into mysteries and thrillers in both book and cinema form [because] they seem to be the one area where authors can deliberately insert their own politics and get away with it". "There's no reason you can't give the audience a thrilling ride and some deeper politics at the same time," he concludes.

James Carter on the Full of IT blog has a different take on Fugard's comments. He disputes the claim that there is a current lack of political work, but asks: "Do political plays become irrelevant when they continually preach to the choir?" Carter recounts that, at a festival of political drama at New York's Ohio Theatre he attended a few years ago, it was the few shows from a rightwing perspective that provoked the most discussion and debate among the predominantly liberal audiences. While he does not suggest "everyone go out and write plays supporting the Republicans", he does think that for work to have real value it needs to find a way of genuinely provoking its audience. "If you have a play about the economy, figure a way to do it on the steps of The Federal Reserve or in front of the bull statue on Wall Street," he writes. "A play about war? Find a way to do it next to an Army recruiting centre ... "

Of course, on a more fundamental level, the trouble with talking about "political theatre" is that it implies that there is such a thing as non-political theatre. All art exists within some kind of social context and is therefore intrinsically politicised; a failure to recognise this fact can lead to hypocrisy. Look, for example, at the controversy surrounding Peter Wyer's new ballet, The Far Shore, which was meant to be performed by the English National Ballet at the Shanghai Expo. Wyer dedicated the piece to "the people of Tibet", and as a result the British Council have pulled it, saying that it has become "a political vehicle". This act of censorship is itself highly political, aimed as it is at placating the Chinese government.

The trouble is that we tend to think of things as being non-political only because we have imbibed a particular set of values so deeply it does not occur to us to question them. Blogger Chris Goode cites Haskell Wexlerto illustrate this:

Suppose a guy says, "I make films where I make the best bucks ... I'm most interested in entertainment and screw all this ideology stuff." Now you couldn't find a stronger political statement than that – yet no one says that's a political statement. Whereas if I say, "I make films that I feel are positive human statements that enlighten or enlarge man's view of life and of the earth and of one another," well, that becomes a political statement. Now that's because our culture has adapted itself to accept consumerism, to accept the profit motive, to accept the personal selfish attitude as "non-political" ...

Perhaps the best way for a piece of art to be political, then, is for it to interrogate values we take for granted – whatever those values happen to be.

20101011 When the Artists Voted for the Politics of Order

Adolf Ziegler's “Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air” which Hitler displayed at home.

By HOLLAND COTTER

 ART REVIEW

When the Artists Voted for the Politics of Order

Guggenheim Museum is giving us the opposite in its major fall exhibition, “Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936.”

In Germany the time would soon come to an end when a painting like Hoch’s could be safely made. But during the postwar Weimar era, artists still had options. The same year Hoch painted “Roma” the art critic Gustav Hartlaub published an authoritative list dividing German modernists into two opposing, evenly populated categories: right-winger classicists and left-winger realists.

Within a few years such distinctions would be meaningless. They meant less than nothing to a new man in power, Hitler, who hated modernism, period. At the same time he loved the idea of classicism, with its cult of perfection and disdain for emotion. He even managed to make a case for the direct descent of Teutonic Germans from ancient Greeks.

It’s with Nazi- and Fascist-sponsored classicism — classicism as political bludgeon — that the show concludes in a gallery at the top of the Guggenheim’s ramp. Here the repressed memory of an earlier war seems to erupt into hallucinations of another to come in Georg Kolbe’s towering bronze brute of a male nude warrior and Arturo Martini’s sculpture of Athena as an avenging Valkyrie.

Most chilling of all is a painted triptych by Adolf Ziegler of four young, nude blond women personifying the four elements. The picture, with its kitschy hyperrealist style, is harmless enough, apart from one detail of its history: That is the painting Hitler chose to put over his apartment mantelpiece when he became leader of the Third Reich.

One final work, a short clip from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” (1936-38), takes us up to the eve of World War II. Mostly it’s a fluid tour, with a triumphalist score, of Greek temple ruins at Olympia and the Acropolis, interspersed with shots of sculptures. Suddenly a sculpture, the “Discobolus” of Myron, comes to life in the form of one of the German athletes who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the film’s main subject. In a stroke of trick editing, a link between two golden ages, Periclean Greece and Nazi Germany, is made.

The transformation is ingenious and ridiculous; appalling, though not really shocking. If post-modernism has done nothing else, it has long since disabused us of the notion that art is, by definition, an expression of any culture’s better nature. “Olympia” can be admired as an aesthetic monument and loathed as political artifact.

In his rigorous and relentless exhibition Mr. Silver extends the same bifurcated moral assessment to many other works of art more and less “great,” and some really bad, though by the time you reach the end of the show, such differences don’t matter. By that point you’re not really seeing objects. You’re seeing scorch marks and bloodstains on the Guggenheim’s pristine walls.









20101012 Tate Modern's "Sunflower Seeds: the world in the palm of your hand

Courtesy of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the Turbine Hall is now carpeted with a million hand-painted seeds – an image of globalisation both politically powerful and hauntingly beautiful

Adrian Searle

guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 October 2010 14.08 BST

Ai Weiwei's installation Sunflower Seeds presents us with an undifferentiated field of grey, filling the space between the bridge and the end wall of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. It is almost disappointing. The late Felix Gonzalez-Torres's piles of cellophane-wrapped sweets, which he showed in the 1980s, were prettier, and you were free to eat them (the American artist liked the idea that people could leave his shows with a nice taste lingering in their mouths). But the sweets were also metaphors for the Aids crisis, and much besides. Nothing in art is what it seems. And you can't eat a single one of Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds, any more than you could Marcel Duchamp's marble sugar cubes. They'd break your teeth.

But you can trudge over them, walk or skip or dance on these seeds, all of them Made inChina. Or scoop up handfuls and let them run through your fingers, in the knowledge that someone, an old lady or a small-town teenager in Jingdezhen, has delicately picked up each one and anointed it with a small brush. Every seed is painted by hand. The town that once made porcelain for the imperial court has been saved from bankruptcy by making sunflower seeds. It is absurd.

I love this work. It is a world in a hundred million objects. It is also a singular statement, in a familiar, minimal form – like Wolfgang Laib's floor-bound rectangles of yellow pollen, Richard Long's stones or Antony Gormley's fields of thousands of little humanoids. Sunflower Seeds, however, is better. It is audacious, subtle, unexpected but inevitable. It is a work of great simplicity and complexity. Sunflower Seeds refers to everyday life, to hunger (the seeds were a reliable staple during the Cultural Revolution), to collective work, and to an enduring Chinese industry. But it is also symbolic. It joins several previous Turbine Hall commissions – most recently Doris Salcedo's 2008 Shibboleth and Miroslaw Balka's How It Is – in a dialogue about the social and cultural place of art.

The meanings are as multiple and singular as its form. Ai Weiwei has taken the lesson of Duchamp's readymade and Warhol's multiples and turned them into a lesson in Chinese history and western modernisation, and the price individuals in China pay for that. Every unique seed is homogenised into a sifting mass. Most contemporary Chinese art is a product made for western consumption, just as willow-pattern plates or porcelain vases were shipped out in huge quantities for the western market.

Ai is the best artist to have appeared since the Cultural Revolution in China. He has smashed ancient vases, taken a thousand Chinese citizens to a small town in Germany – his contribution to the five-yearly Documenta contemporary art show in Kassel in 2007 – made works about the Chinese government's response to the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, and the social crackdowns during the year of the Olympics. Ai takes on the world through an attitude, rather than a style. With his blogs and tweets, he is a constant communicator. However absurd his works might appear to be, he understands the place of the artist, recognising that his work exists in a global world of social, cultural and economic relations. He has a sort of social engagement Duchamp lacked, or couldn't have, and that Warhol dissembled.

Ai's field of sunflower seeds is both contemplative and barbed. Generous in spirit, everyone can get it. It will no doubt have a huge audience at Tate Modern, one that might see it as no more than an entertaining spectacle and treat it like a day at the beach. Yet Sunflower Seeds is contingent, oddly moving and beautiful. It is like quicksand.





20101015 Germany (carefully) opens first Hitler Exhibit (VIDEO)

Adolf Hitler led the Nazi party to power, steered a regime that orchestrated the murder of more than 7 million Jews, Romas, gays and other minorities, and instigated World War II. But until now, he never had a museum exhibit dedicated to him in Germany.

"Hitler and the Germans," an exhibition that opens on Friday in Berlin's German Historical Museum, took six years to assemble and consciously avoids glorifying the former leader: Rooms with his bust have been made too small to take group photos in, and objects Hitler may have touched have been almost entirely excluded.

20101109 Dancers Leap Over U.S.-Cuba Political Barriers

by: Nick Miroff

Listen to the story on NPR: Listen to the Story

In Cuba, American artists and musicians are going where tourists and politicians cannot. In October, trumpet legend Wynton Marsalis came to Havana with members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. And last week, the American Ballet Theater was in town for the first time in 50 years.

It's the latest attempt at cultural diplomacy for two long-estranged neighbors with similar tastes in arts and entertainment.

For two consecutive nights, Cubans packed Havana's Karl Marx Theater to watch more than 50 American dancers leap, twirl and float across the stage.

The program included George Balanchine's Theme and Variations, choreographed in 1947 for a young Cuban dancer living in New York named Alicia Alonso.

Alonso returned to Havana and founded Cuba's National Ballet. She would later become one of the Castro revolution's most loyal cultural ambassadors. Alonso, who turns 90 next month, remains Cuba's prima ballerina.

"She was one of founding members who grew up professionally in the company and set a standard for us, and it's like she's imprinted into the genetic makeup of the company," said Kevin McKenzie, artistic director of the New York-based American Ballet Theatre

New Opening For Cultural Exchanges?

The family theme is in line with the Obama administration's policy of permitting Cubans with relatives on the island to travel freely, while allowing artists in both countries to travel back and forth with greater ease.

"That we were allowed to come really represents what we hope is a new opening of allowing these exchanges to happen," said Rachel Moore, the ballet company's executive director.

"We really see that the arts connect people in a really profound way, and can transform lives, and there's a shared humanity," Moore said. "And when you come to a place you may not know very well, and you share your heart and soul through the arts, people recognize that we're all the same, and that's the power."

The cultural connections between the U.S. and Cuba — whether baseball, dance or music — may be strong, but they haven't been able to achieve a political breakthrough.

The Obama administration has responded tepidly to recent economic reforms in Cuba, and Cuba experts say the Republican takeover in the U.S. House of Representatives may chill whatever warmth these encounters generate.

But Moore says her company was thrilled to perform in a place where ballet tickets typically cost 40 cents, and male lead dancers are idolized like baseball stars.

"The audience here is extremely well versed in ballet, people are knowledgeable, and they know the individual dancers, and they have their favorites, and you walk into the theater and there's already a hum, people know ballets," Moore said. "It's really wonderful because you have this engagement you don't get in the United States."

Art As A 'Meeting Point'

With tickets at the 5,000-seat theater sold out, the Cuban government broadcast the American company's performances live on television. Ballet fans lucky enough to get in said it was an once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a company that they only knew in legend.

In the theater lobby, Leida Silva asked a friend to take her picture beside an old black-and-white New York ballet poster with a young Alicia Alonso.

"This is a symbol of friendship, which is something we really need. It's an unprecedented step forward, and art has always served as a meeting point," Silva said. "Alicia got her start with this company, so all Cubans love it."

The cultural interchange between Manhattan and Havana is likely to continue in the coming months, as the New York Philharmonic orchestra has been granted permission by the U.S. Treasury Department to perform in Cuba.

20101110 Jack Levine, a Painter Who Twinned Realism And Satire, Dies at 95

By: William Grimes

20101112 Controversial Chinese artist ordered to demolish studio

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8105176/Controversial-Chinese-artist-ordered-to-demolish-studio.html

Here is a video of his studio under construction, and what it looked like finished:

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20101117 'American kills' public art highlights military suicide

By: Eliott C. McLaughlin

20101126 Art performance awakens public to social issues in political rivalry

MALE, November 26 (HNS) – An art performance was held on Thursday to reflect the social problems caused as a result of extreme political rivalry in the Maldives.

Renowned local artist, Afzal ‘Afu’ Shaafiu Hassan raised the issue of disintegration of social fabric, increase in hatred and divisions among people, and dying out of respect for different opinions in the Maldives as a result of political rivalry.

President Mohamed Nasheed also attended the art performance “Social Crisis,” held at the Republican Square Thursday afternoon.

Afzal wants people to engage in peaceful and healthy political competitiveness, to make room for the opinions of others, and to rejuvenate the social fabric. He believes that political differences must not create hostility and resentment amongst the public. Through his performance, Afzal also aims to urge politicians to encourage people to be united and respect the differences in the society.

 

20101126 Giant Earth Art Displays Dramatize Climate Urgency

 CANCUN, Mexico, November 26, 2010 (ENS) - Events this weekend will cap 350 EARTH, a week-long series of giant public art displays around the planet to help raise awareness of the climate crisis before the United Nations annual climate summit begins in Cancun Monday.

 

20101129 Portland Terrorist Fabrication

 "Fabricated Terror," by: Brandon Hamson (~hamsonb). 3D Art

"A Terrorist May Not Be a Terrorist," by: Jeanne Finley

20101130 DeMaio Seeks to Axe City's Arts Funding

By: Kelly Bennett, from Voiceofsandiego.org

(DeMaio contact info at end of article)

The arts and culture infantry that shows up whenever the city of San Diego's leaders consider cutting public funding for arts is likely just over that next hill.

I'm the arts editor for VOSD. Have an idea for something I should write about San Diego's arts scene? Please contact me directly at kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0531. You can also follow me on Twitter: @kellyrbennett. 

20101130 Legislating the Art World

By: James Bowman of the American Spectator

Legislating the Art World

In art news this month, a Brazilian artist named Gil Vicente has rocketed to international fame by exhibiting, as part of the Sao Paulo Art Biennial, a series of drawings depicting himself in the act of assassinating various world leaders and ex-world leaders, including the pope, Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, and (inevitably, I suppose) former president George W. Bush. According to the LondonDaily Telegraph, "The series, called Inimigos (Enemies), is meant to highlight alleged crimes for which the leaders have been directly or indirectly responsible by imagining that they are being made to pay the price." Or, as Mr. Vicente himself puts it, "Because they kill so many other people, it would be a favor to kill them, understand? Why don't people in power and in the elite die?" The answer, if we pretend for a moment that he really wants an answer, is of course that Mr. Vicente is not an actual assassin but only an artist, which is to say (these days) a fantasist whose job it is to produce the sort of fantasy which will resonate sufficiently with the world's media culture to win him fame and fortune. With the carefully calculated shock of his assassination drawings he has clearly found such a fantasy -- though Nicholson Baker beat him to it by six years in the case of President Bush, with his novel Checkpoint.

Ho hum. There is a manufactured quality to the "outrage" of such essentially conceptual art -- increasingly the only art we have. Like Martin Kippenberger's crucified frog in Zuerst die Fuesse (Feet First) or Jesus receiving oral sex in "Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals" by Enrique Chagoya (no relation to Francisco Goya) which, together with similar rubbish, I keep up with through the regular bulletins of Bill Donohue's Catholic League -- an organization almost Christ-like in its willingness to take upon itself a perpetual state of outrage on our behalf -- this is so obviously created only to provoke that you've got to wonder at the gullibility (if that's what it is) of those who continue to enrich both the provokers and the media's messengers of their provocation by insisting on being provoked by it. It's almost enough to make you sympathize with the Muslims whose violent ways -- for all the tragic harm they cause to the innocent and artists like Molly Norris, the cartoonist for the Seattle Weekly whose bright idea for an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" has ended with her disappearance (she has "gone ghost") for security reasons -- at least must prevent a great many talentless and pipsqueak "artists" from making a living out of becoming professional blasphemers.

One interesting thing about Mr. Vicente's assassination art is its residual connection, however tenuous, to reality. It would not exist at all if the figures of the fantasy assassin's victims were not recognizable as real people, and people whose actual assassination would be even more sensational news than that of an otherwise obscure Brazilian artist's simply fantasizing about it. The recognizable part of the drawings must also stand in for such reality as their political fantasy can claim. We know that there are such people as the queen and the pope and President Bush -- Mr. Vicente's other imaginary victims include President Lula da Silva of Brazil and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan -- even though the idea of them as mass murderers is ridiculous to anyone with an even slightly firmer tether to reality. So to characterize them, however, identifies the artist as a worker in two different kinds of fantasy simultaneously: both the artistic kind and the political kind. The two depend on one another. Without pundits who have already found their own path to a mostly limited sort of fame through calling, or coming close to calling, the former president a murderer, the artist who did so would merely be a lunatic of no news value to the media.

When Shelley (following Dr. Samuel Johnson) called his fellow poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" he was pointing to what we would call, in present-day terms, the phenomenon of high culture leading low culture. It was the poets, artists, and philosophers of the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement who were pointing the way -- and a narrow and difficult way it often was -- for the progressives of their day engaged in the humbler arts of journalism and political propaganda. Nowadays, the relationship between politicians and publicists on the one hand and the more prestigious kind of arts on the other has been reversed. It is not the high end of artistic production that gets converted into politics but the low end of politics that gets converted into such artistic production as we still have. Crude as the leftism of the Nation or the New York Review of Books often is, it has so far stopped short of assassination fantasies and other such monkeyshines, so far as I know. That kind of thing is left to the artists, like Mr. Vicente, or novelists, like Nicholson Baker, or filmmakers like Michael Moore, who have hoovered up the leavings of their thought along with other pop cultural odds and ends and so found a great way to recycle them as allegedly artistic gestures to titillate, frighten, or shock their more sober fellow citizens.

We must have known this was happening, I guess, when "outrageous," "insane," "sick," and (of course) "bad" became synonyms for "good." But such shocking reversals couldn't have happened if art had not already been reduced to gestures that nobody expected to express anything but raw feeling, if that. A few spoke out against Mr. Baker's assassination fantasy back in 2004, but I doubt that many will bother protesting against Mr. Vicente's -- except maybe in Brazil, where the outgoing President Lula is still said to be immensely popular. For the same reason, Tipper Gore's now long-ago crusade against raunchy pop and rap lyrics seems like a quaint relic of the 1980s -- even to most conservatives, I imagine. The lyrics are no less raunchy, but people have grown used to them and now take them seriously only as art, insofar as art can be taken seriously anymore, and not as outrage.

SPEAKING OF TAKING THEM seriously as art, a year or so ago I wrote -- following some protests from readers about my censure of theNew York Times for treating the video game Grand Theft Auto as a work of art (see "Grand Larceny" in The American Spectator of June 2008) -- asking if anyone could show me a case for treating rap or hip hop "poetry" on a level with, well, real poetry. I was reacting to a negative and typically unhelpful review in the New York Times Book Review of a book by an English professor called Adam Bradley titledBook of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, and none other than Professor Bradley himself wrote to me, sending me a copy of his book. As he is obviously a charming and intelligent as well as a generous man, I wish I could say I had been persuaded by him that the rappers he admires -- including Rakim, Jay-Z, and Tupac Shakur, for instance, who (he says) "deserve consideration alongside the giants of American poetry" -- were the unacknowledged legislators of our own era. Or even that they were as witty, profound, or linguistically inventive as your average giant of American poetry. But although the professor makes an interesting if not inarguable case that the rhythms, rhymes, and other formal features of the hip hoppers' verse are not utterly discontinuous with the traditions of English poetry, he has hardly a word to say about its content which, judging from his own examples, is never anything other than boastful accounts of the rappers' own auto-inebriation or intoxication, their sexual exploits, their (mostly fanciful) violent acts, their cars, and their jewelry.

That's good enough for artistic work these days, I guess. Andy Warhol was in this, as in so many other ways, the pioneer, the first to see how art could become parasitic on the publicity industry and the trashiest sort of popular culture to the benefit of both. Art continued to enjoy the cachet it had retained from the days when it actually had something of importance to say while shedding some of its own derivative glory upon the Campbell's soup tins and the repeated silk-screen images of Marilyn or Liz. Without Warhol, there would never have been a Mad Men to enliven our Sunday evenings with the conceit, which even he might have found shocking, of advertising (N.B., not rap) as the great American art form. Now it's the spin doctors and publicists and their media offshoots who are the unofficial, though hardly unacknowledged, legislators of the world. They lead the way that both the titular legislators -- and magistrates -- and artists like Matthew Weiner, inventor of Mad Men, are content to follow, ever in awe of their monkey-tricks. Well, why not? These are the nearest things we have to contemporaneously produced artistic beauty anymore. 

Link to original article: spectator.org/archives/2010/11/30/legislating-the-art-world

20101202 (Video) The GOP and the Artist Who Spoiled Yet Another Christmas

by: Michael B. Keegan, President of "People For The American Way."

In 1992, the American artist David Wojnarowicz died after a battle with AIDS, at the age of 37. He left behind him a host of challenging, provocative works of art...and a legacy of challenging and provoking the Religious Right. Toward the end of his life, Wojnarowicz's art drew the outrage of the American Family Association, which used images of his work on pro-censorship pamphlets, and who he in turn sued for copyright infringement. Now, 18 years after his death, Wojnarowicz is again a target of the Religious Right's newly empowered censorship efforts.

Wojnarowicz's four-minute video piece, "A Fire in My Belly," which evokes the suffering of AIDS victims using Latin American themes inspired by the artist's time in Mexico, was included in a groundbreaking exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery examining gay and lesbian identity in American art. The Right is, unsurprisingly, unhappy with the existence of the exhibit and found in Wojnarowicz's video a convenient lightning rod: 11seconds depicting ants crawling over a statue of Christ on the cross.

Hours after right-wing groups began to voice their opposition to the 11 second fragment of the video, the director of the Portrait Gallery announced that the piece would be removed. The reason? "Some of the accounts of this got out so virally and so vehemently," said Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan, "that people were leaping to a conclusion that we were intentionally trying to provoke Christians or spoil the Christmas season."

The path from David Wojnarowicz's struggle with AIDS to the director of a Smithsonian museum announcing, ironically on World AIDS Day, that Wojnarowicz's artwork might spoil someone's Christmas, says a lot about American politics at the start of a new era of right-wing power. A Religious Right extremist generated controversy in the far-right base, found an eager echo chamber in the Capitol Hill GOP, and won an astoundingly easy instant victory over a skittish federal agency.

At the center of this Christmas politics story is Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, one of the cadre of powerful groups in the United States that devote themselves to bringing church and state closer together. We've been tracking Donohue's extremism for years. Since joining the Catholic League in 1993, at the height of the last wave of censorship wars, Donohue has railed against the secular world, against non-Christians, and against Christians who he deems to be not Christian enough. He ferociously attacked critics of the Catholic Church in the midst of child molestation scandals, repeatedly questioning whether victims were actually molested. He has called progressive Catholics "termites." He has accused "cultural facists" of "neutering Christmas." And he, like many of his fellow crusaders, reserves a special hatred for gay people, referring to the "gay deathstyle" and equating gay people with pedophiles. Just this July, he penned a column for the Washington Post's On Faith website titled, "Catholic Church's issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia."

Donohue has lurked on the far-right edges of the political debate for years. But with the wave of truly far-right extremists elected to the House and a GOP leadership eager to appease them, he and others like him have found fast friends and new traction for their extremism.

The far-right news service CNS News first broke the "ant crucifix" story Monday in an epic 3,700 word article that examined many of the supposedly objectionable works in the Portrait Gallery's exhibit. Donohue immediately jumped on it, telling Fox News that Wojnarowicz's work is "hate speech" and launching a media campaign that quickly took off. He soon had the support of incoming House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who called for the entire exhibit to be taken down, and threatened "tough scrutiny" of Smithsonian funding if the exhibit wasn't pulled. The Smithsonian resisted calls to take down the entire exhibit, but by Tuesday afternoon, it had agreed to pull Wojnarowicz's video. And this despite the report from the Portrait Gallery's director that the museum had not received a single complaint about the piece from a person who had actually visited the exhibit.

It should come as little surprise that this whole media whirlwind has included minimal discussion of the work of art in question. The context of its inspiration as a work of art depicting suffering from AIDS and not as anti-Christian ammunition in the War on Christmas is not being discussed in the media frenzy. Indeed, that has become beside the point. Bill Donohue has appointed himself the nation's chief art critic and religious scholar, and the soon-to-be installed Republican House leadership our prime art censor. Donohue said the art hurt his feelings; the newly-empowered Boehner and Cantor threatened the Smithsonian's funding; the Smithsonian apologized and gave in.

Donohue has spent his career insisting that the only true Christians are those that fit themselves into a narrow far-right box, and that the only true Americans are Christians. He now has a powerful political movement to amplify his voice, and political leadership that will lend heft to his threats. This debate is not about 11 seconds of an artist's video. It's about who gets to speak for the American people.

The Portrait Gallery's director said that Wajmorowicz's artwork might "spoil the Christmas season" for some Americans. I am sorry if that is the case. I, for one, am an American who would rather spend Christmas in a free society surrounded by diverse points of view, knowing that my government respects me enough to let me decide who I will listen to, who I will ignore, what art I will like, and what will offend me. Art censorship is an easy show for the GOP to put on for its far-right base. But it's not one that we, as a free society, can afford to accept.

20101207 Ireland’s woes through the lens of art

By: Laura Lynch

20101208 Smithsonian Institution fails to stand up to anti-gay bullies

By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic

20101209 Nudity courts controversy in Qatar's new museum

Doha, Qatar (CNN) -- With exhibits showing nudity and politically radical ideas, Qatar's brand new modern art museum may raise a few eyebrows in the traditionally conservative Middle East.
The Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, founded by powerful Qatari art patron Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al-Thani, is slated to open in Qatar's capital, Doha, just before the new year.

Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Mathaf's chief curator, says one of the museum's major contributions to the growing Middle Eastern art scene will be to push the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable in the region.
That means that works containing nudity and politically sensitive imagery -- often taboo subjects in this part of the world -- will not be subject to censorship, according to Al-Khudhairi.

"The collection has these kinds of works in it. The collection has nudes; the collection has political works. These things are part of the collection -- we can't deny it."
She added that Mathaf was willing to risk criticism for showing controversial works.
"I think there will be all kinds of feedback and the museum is about creating a space for dialogue; a platform for discussion," Al-Khudhairi said.

Mathaf, which means "museum" in Arabic, will host a collection of more than 6,000 artworks dating from the late 1800s to the middle of the 20th century.
The collection belongs to art patron Al-Thani, who has spent more than two decades amassing valuable pieces while championing creativity throughout the Middle East.
The museum will hold its debut exhibition, titled "Sajjil," at its temporary home in a 5,500-square meter former school building updated by French architect Jean-Francois Bodin.
"Sajjil," which features paintings and sculptures by more than 100 key modernists, is aimed at bringing contemporary Arabic art to a wider audience.

"Our first exhibition, 'Sajjil' is about the interaction and about the contribution of Arab artists to a larger art historical context," Al-Khudhairi said.
"By making it public, we are able to open it up to everyone in Qatar, in the region, internationally."

Crucially, adds Al-Khudhairi, it will also draw attention to a contemporary art scene that developed in parallel with European movements but has been largely overlooked.
"(The exhibition will) give exposure to these artists to fit into history a period of time that's missing from art historical books and accounts," she said.

Saleh Barakat, a Beirut-based leading expert in contemporary Arab art, described the museum's opening as "an exceedingly important moment in the history of modern and contemporary art."
Barakat says the museum's commitment to academic study and research will be particularly significant.

Arts patronage in Qatar, and the wider region is reaching new heights, amid a recession-busting art boom, as governments vie for the title of the region's cultural capital. Two years ago, Doha opened the doors of its Museum of Islamic Art, an iconic structure that celebrated architect I.M. Pei. was coaxed out of retirement at the age of 91 to design.
In Abu Dhabi, a vast Frank Gehry-designed outpost of New York's Guggenheim art museum is under construction alongside a branch of France's Louvre museum.
Art expert Barakat said that Mathaf's commitment to pushing boundaries would help define Qatar's identity as a liberal-minded Arab country, although he said some artworks would remain contentious.

"In Qatar, they are, at least, conveying these messages that they want to be an open society, but I guess that's within limits because these societies have their own culture and their own view of the world," said Barakat.
He added: "Obviously one has to keep in mind we are in Doha and not in New York, and in that instance there are acceptable norms of how any society views nudity or other kinds of provocative issues."

20101216 Banksy Finances Russian Anarchist Art Collective

By DJ Pangburn Wednesday, December 15, 2010

With all the attention on leaked government documents of late, we seem to have forgotten how revolutionary a few political artists can be...

Street art and anti-authoritarian provocateur Banksy donated $147,000 to Moscow-based art collective Voina (War) by selling prints of his “Choose Your Weapon” painting. The money will be spent to help free some of the imprisoned Voina members, jailed after a September political stunt called “Palace Revolution” that involved a coordinated over-turning of Moscow police cars in protest against the Ministry of Home Affairs.

According to ArtInfo, two Voina members, Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev, were taken without a warrant, severely beaten and are now awaiting trial. (A familiar theme with governments these days.) Other members have fled Russia and have had their passports confiscated.

Amongst the group’s other absurdist pranks, there has been a public orgy at the State Biological Museum in front of a banner ridiculing Putin’s successor Medvedev; live cats thrown at McDonald’s staff during International Worker’s Day; and a huge skull and crossbones projected onto the exterior of the Russian Parliament.

A Reuters article from a few years ago quoted Voina member Kotyonok as saying, “We hate cops but if we just attacked them… they would jail us immediately. So we hide our hatred behind art so they can’t get us and we achieve our aim quicker.”

According to the BBC, Banksy heard of Voina through the UK network’s Lucy Ash who profiled the group. One of Banksy’s representatives contacted Ash and inquired as to the amount of Rubles it would take to lift them from jail.

One can see how Banksy would identify with these art rebels, and it makes one wonder why we haven’t seen similar pranks from American groups when these Russians have had to contend with a government compromised of ex-KGB operatives.

Are Americans that neutered?

20101216 Jimmy McMillan (Rent is 2 Damn High Party) Sings Songs of Rent and Love

By Marlon Bishop: WNYC Culture Producer

The founder of the “Rent is 2 DAMN High” Party is riding his Internet stardom to jump-start a long dormant musical career. Download an exclusive track he gave WNYC below.

On Thursday evening, Jimmy McMillan is going to get on stage with a guitar and perform for the first time in over 20 years, but he's not nervous. "Every child is my child, and when I look out, I'm gonna' look at the faces of my children," says McMillan. "And Daddy's never nervous around his kids."

McMillan’s performance tonight comes almost two months after his run as a long-shot candidate in the New York gubernatorial race vaulted him into sudden political celebrity. Representing his "Rent is 2 DAMN High" party, McMillan brought his Victorian-era facial hair and theatrical approach to rent activism. Although he didn’t win the seat, he did get 40,000 votes in the general election and, more importantly perhaps, over 5 million views on YouTube.

Yet there's another Jimmy McMillan that few fans are familiar with: the ‘70s soul singer who has seized on his 15 minutes of fame to relaunch a long dormant musical career. On December 7th, McMillan released an album of rent-centric songs called The Rent is Too Damn High, Vol. 1, which is currently available on iTunes and Amazon for $5.99. The album is made up of extremely lo-fi hip-hop songs that feature McMillan’s powerful baritone. McMillan produced and recorded the album himself in his bedroom, playing all the parts into a MIDI keyboard. Among the tracks are “Land Lord Listen Up,” “Rent Party Christmas,” and a single romantic ballad, “My Place.” The YouTube music video for another song on the album, "Ain't Nothing to Talk About," showcases the ironic gyrations of three white, 20-something backup female dancers. At tonight’s performance at Klub Europa in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, however, McMillan will play solo with his guitar. That’s when he really shines.

"Do you think you guys can find two guys with mustaches who look like me to stand on either side of the stage when I sing? I think that would be cool," says McMillan. The question is directed at Kristian Almgren and Aaron Fisher-Cohen, the two 26-year-old filmmakers behind "DAMN," a Jimmy McMillan documentary currently in production. Almgren and Fisher-Cohen began to shoot Jimmy shortly after they watched him at the gubernatorial debate, and along the way have become his friends and de facto music managers. It's three days before the gig, and all three are in an old brick loft in outer Bushwick, home to Fantastic Relationship Filmmaking's cozy production studio. McMillan is seated in front of a storyboard covered in index cards scribbled with phrases like "Jimmy at Fox News” and “Jimmy in Car." McMillan's clad in a sharp gray suit and is demonstrating new tunes on his guitar, which he's had custom-wrapped with an American flag print for his show. "He's taking this gig really seriously," confides Almgren. "Maybe too seriously."

McMillan’s not exactly sure when he started playing music. He says that a bomb attack he suffered in the Vietnam War wiped out his memory of his life before the war. "My uncle said I played guitar with him in a gospel band, but I don't remember that," says McMillan. The way he tells it, his musical story begins when he found a guitar hanging in a shack in Vietnam. McMillan says he stashed the guitar in a helicopter he was riding in and taught himself Sam and Dave's R&B anthem "Hold On I'm Coming" in the Vietnam barracks where he was serving.

When McMillan got back to Brooklyn from Vietnam, he continued to sustain himself on a diet of soul music. "My favorite artists back then were Otis Redding, Otis Redding, and Otis Redding,” he says. He was working as a letter carrier at a Manhattan post office; afterhours, he was a street busker in Washington Square Park. He became the lead singer of a soul band, and made music under the name “Jimmy Mack.” McMillan created his own independent record label, Hamster Records, and released a smoking single called "A Woman is So Hard to Understand" in 1975 (video at right). With its wobbly clav and driving backbeat, it's a classic track in the "Northern Soul" style popular in 1970s England, and McMillan says it played on the radio in New York for six months. It even made it onto an English compilation from Soul Food Records called Blackpool Mecca Legends.

McMillan left the soul band in the '80s and turned to activism, but he continued to make songs on his own, this time with an overtly political message. He's sketched out dozens of songs since then on his computer, but never thought anyone would be interested in them.

But people were, specifically filmmakers Kristian Almgren and Aaron Fisher-Cohen. "Our initial reaction was: ‘This isn’t bad.’ There’s kernels of genius in there,” says Almgren. He listened to the tracks during their first session filming “DAMN,” and encouraged McMillan to rerelease his rent songs as an album.

Initially, McMillan didn't believe anyone would be into his music. “I’m like, he’s freaking crazy. I thought he must be smoking crack or something,” reflects McMillan.

But it took just five hours for Almgren and Fisher-Cohen to make a Jimmy McMillan album. They were already familiar with the one-click world of indie music distribution from years of playing in their own bands. Almgren and Fisher-Cohen chose 12 songs out of 50 that McMillan sent them. Then, they released them online, without any mixing or mastering. The songs are glaringly unfinished and full of technical flaws, but that’s part of the charm, says Almgren. A friend transformed McMillan’s icon-worthy facial hair into minimalist album art, and voila, an album was made.

Almgren and Fisher-Cohen are careful to insist that their involvement in the music making was minimal, lest the documenters become actors in the unfolding McMillan story. Yet they did handle the booking for Thursday’s show, and hired a P.R. company to promote Jimmy’s big debut. “People smell money with Jimmy, and that was not our motivation, because we had the film,” says Almgren. The duo made the music video (at right) for free to thank McMillon for giving them such incredible access to his life during the past few months. In return, McMillan has gotten Almgren and Fisher-Cohen to tell his story and promote his music.

Reactions to Jimmy McMillan have been varied in the aftermath of the gubernatorial race. Some political commentators were outraged that McMillan and other fringe political characters were taken seriously and put on a stage alongside mainstream candidates. Yet McMillan’s wackiness, natural charisma and basic working class platform have won him more than a few fans, some of whom have even called for McMillan to run for president. One Amazon album reviewer wrote, “Jimmy’s music has a humanitarian message that resonated with me. He just tells it like it is and I wish he had won because it would have been interesting to see what this guy could do.”

As it turns out, McMillan also has all the makings of an hipster icon. His unconventional facial hair and old-school style mirror steampunk aesthetics. The chintzy, early ‘90s quality to his new album also unintentionally resonates with the indie scene’s current fascination with low-grade digital synthesizers. So, it's no coincidence that his first gig is at a divey Polish nightclub in bohemian Greenpoint. “It's great to hear music that has such honesty behind it,” says Fisher-Cohen. “We’re so used to listening to music that’s so self-conscious. Jimmy is making music about something he’s completely obsessed and emotional about—and that’s 'rent.'"

McMillan says that anyone can make a name for themselves if they just give it their all. “If I can stand up on this stage at age 65 tomorrow and not show any nervousness, you can do the same dog-gone thing. It's time to step up your game,” he says. “America’s kids aren’t fighting for anything, they don't want to get their hair wet. I'm fighting to let them know that they’re gonna' have to rise up, peacefully, and get involved in the election system, and send all those politicians that are not doing what they should be doing for you on a long vacation. And I'm gonna' do it through the music.”

Jimmy McMillan performs Thursday night at Klub Europa, at 98 Meserole Ave. in Brooklyn. Tickets are $10.

Stream or Download "My Guitar" by Jimmy McMillan, which is not found on any album. McMillan gave it exclusively to WNYC.

20101216 Tokyo to restrict Manga sales: An attack on free speech or a safeguard for children?

20101216 Whitewash at MOCA: Jeffrey Deitch Censors Blu's Political Street Art Mural

Photo by Casey Caplowe, courtesy Unurth

By ARTINFO
Published: December 13, 2010

LOS ANGELES— Is street art too hot for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art? The genre is known for its feisty, topical energy — fire that Los Angeles MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, a longtime street-art evangelist, hoped to tap into with its much-anticipated upcoming "Art in the Streets" survey of graffiti greats. Now that show is likely to be stalked by controversy after the institution ordered the whitewashing of a mural by the well-known street artist Blu on the outside wall of the Geffen Contemporary building. The work had been commissioned as part of the run-up to the show's April 17 opening. Apparently, the erasure was an effort to avoid a political uproar. Instead, it seems likely to ignite one.

For his work on the museum's exterior wall, Blu created a massive panorama of coffins draped in one dollar bills — a provocative image considering that the wall faces an L.A. Veterans' Affairs Hospital, as well as the so-called Go For Broke monument, which honors Japanese-American soldiers who fought in the Pacific during World War II. The mural was whitewashed on Thursday, mere hours after the mural went up on Wednesday night. According to a statement issued by MOCA, "The museum's director explained to Blu that in this context, where MOCA is a guest among this historic Japanese American community, the work was inappropriate."

(MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, photo by Billy Farrell/BFAnyc.com)

It's not clear whether the museum knew of the design in advance, or whether it actually received any complaints before erasing it. Los Angeles Downtown News contacted the veterans affairs center management, who said that they had not complained, while reps from the National Go For Broke Education Center said that while some members found the mural to be in poor taste, the organization had not voiced any objections to the museum.

Footage of the erasure has quickly circulated on street art blogs and became a sensation. In L.A. MOCA's statement, the museum says it has "invited Blu to return to Los Angeles to paint another mural." The Bologna-based artist, known for giant cartoon images that often deal with violence, is often listed as one of the brightest lights of the worldwide graffiti art scene. He has painted murals for such prominent venues as the Tate Modern, where he was part of a high-profile 2008 show.

(The "Go For Broke" monument in Chinatown, Los Angeles)

So, what does the artist think about all this? Apparently he was on the scene for the whitewashing. Street art advocate and curator Daniel Lahoda told Los Angeles Downtown News that the artist was unhappy with the development. Blu's personal blog, which features two posts dated the day after the take-down, strikes a comical, if cryptic, note. One post features a drawing of the museum as a giant coffee pot, with a punning line (in Italian) underneath: "Of course, the first time I heard 'MOCA' this is what I thought of." The second features a picture of the whitewashed Geffen Contemporary wall with a caption in English: "a really nice, big wall, in downtown L.A."

UPDATE: Blu has said he is not going to return to MOCA to make a second mural, and he has issued the following statement to Animal New York:

"sad story
but watching the reactions is much more
interesting than giving my personal opinion

"the facts are known:

"Blu is asked by Moca to paint a wall
the wall is painted (not completely finished
unfortunately)
Moca decides to erase the wall
the wall is now white

"the images are already public
everyone can make his own idea about the event

"for everything else
time will tell…."

To see the mural being painted over, watch the video below.

www.artinfo.com/news/story/36568/whitewash-at-moca-jeffrey-deitch-censors-blus-political-street-art-mural/

20101218 Casting of black man in film, "Thor," taken as liberal provocation.

By: Ian Dosland

The conservative website and radio station, Council of Conservative Americans, stated recently that Marvel Studios has, "Declared war on Norse Mythology" (cofcc.org/2010/12/marval-studios-declares-war-on-norse-mythology/). This group feels that this attack by Stan Lee is yet another attempt to undermine conservative values. Lee has been accused by the site of, "leading attacks on conservatives, the Tea Party, and European Heritage" (hiphopwired.com/2010/12/17/white-supremacists-oppose-idris-elba’s-role-in-the-movie-“thor”/). They have even created a website in protest: boycott-thor.com/. The website argues the following: 

'Well, they have a point, to a point. Norse mythology was white because the people using it were white. But I do find it insulting to black people. I mean, why not make a film based on African mythology with black people? Throwing a black guy into a mythological white role is a little patronizing, kinda like when someone claimed a black man invented the first ‘clothes dryer’, when in fact all he came up with was a hanger next to the stove. But I don’t give a sh*t because I’m not watching this trash. And yeah, Marvel has always had a very annoying liberal, mult-cultural, politically-correct slant, but that’s old news. But it is one reason I can’t stand their comic books, as I consider them an insult to my intelligence. They’re like one rung above Image in all respects." 

And in a letter to Marvel they stated this:

"Dear Mr. Klein,
I am writing to express my deep concern over your company’s depiction of the god Heimdall in the movie “Thor”.
Heimdall was revered by generations of my ancestors, and continues to be central to the culture of tens of thousands of Asatru believers, as “hvítastr ása” or the “whitest of the aesir”. Like the millions of Northern Europeans who once made Heimdall central to their daily lives, Heimdall has historically been depicted as Scando-Nordid, with fair hair and skin.
While Marvel likely intended Mr. Elba’s casting to be a gesture of harmless irony, choosing an African actor to portray “the white god” displays a profound and acerbic disrespect both for people of Germanic descent and history itself. Whatever the motive behind the decision, it appears to be an intentional and racially charged slap in the face.
I urge you to practice a single standard and afford the same respect to ethnic Europeans that you would offer to any other ethnic group.
Sincerely,
Ian Huyett"

Elba issued the following retort in an interview with TV Times:

“There has been a big debate about it: can a black man play a Nordic character? Hang about, Thor's mythical, right? Thor has a hammer that flies to him when he clicks his fingers. That's OK, but the colour of my skin is wrong?” (hiphoptimes.com)

It seems that there is a real issue here with the claims being made by all sides. The CofCC has been citing the hypocrisy of statements by members of movie media (specifically, Moviefone). But the question is, are they making a valid argument? Can a group made up of conservative Christians be so offended by an "attack" on a religion they do not even ascribe to?

This has less to do with Christianity and more to do with white supremacy. Why? Because for some years now white supremacists have been hijacking Norse religion to bring a more inconspicuous imagery to their hateful cause. Even white supremacist bands like, "Thor's Hammer" draw imagery of a god like superior white race. 

This is less a case of, "we conservatives are offended by your changing a white god into a black one," and more of a, "we white supremacists are...blah blah..." If these people are supposed to be the voice of the conservative right (on their AM radio station that plays on a few stations in the US), and a voice of traditional conservative Christian values,  how can they expect to be taken seriously? Even more so, how will this negatively affect the image of non-Christian, non-white-supremacists, who do ascribe to Norse religion, or at least wear it's history (e.g. clothing and tattoos)? You want to talk about a provocation? Start there. Also, I am pretty sure that this white "master race" was responsible for the massive and indiscriminate killing of Christians and other white people all over Europe. I'm surprised that this group has chosen to defend a historical enemy. (PS: Thor was a red head, or at least red-bearded. This was looked down upon by Christians most likely because Judas was a red-head. They have an old saying, "Red beard, devil steered.) 

Here's the movie preview:

20101221 Apple Is Largest Distributor of White Power Music -- the Best Recruiting Tool Supremacist Groups Have

By: MJ Olahafa  

Apple claims it's too big to monitor for hate content -- but MySpace and similar large sites have worked diligently to identify and remove racist music.

For those who have been following the recent controversies at Apple, it’s clear that hate has found a home in the company’s many platforms.

Apple recently launched an app for NumbersUSA, an anti-immigrant group that is part of a network with ties to white nationalism. NumbersUSA’s executive director Roy Beck is a frequent contributor to The Social Contract Press, a white nationalist quarterly journal published by John Tanton. Both TSCP’s editor, Wayne Lutton, and Roy Beck have associated with Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization.

Apple also broadcasts The Political Cesspool, a radio show hosted by white supremacist James Edwards. Along with hailing Hitler and advocating his hatred for the Jews, Edwards voices his views on immigration, or more precisely ‘non-white immigration.’ In his own words:

“The reason why America was a First World nation was because we had a First World population, and as we continue to be inundated with people from Third World nations we are going to become a Third World nation.”

It should come as no surprise then that Apple also allows white power music to be sold through iTunes. Apple is the largest purveyor of music that gives a platform to racist bands to spread their hateful message worldwide.

White power music has become the most significant recruiting tool for organized bigots across the globe. It has succeeded in infiltrating numerous youth subcultures, transforming healthy youth rebellion into hardcore white supremacy.

Skrewdriver is one of the bands whose music can be purchased on iTunes. Following are lyrics from the song ‘Europe Awake’ on the ‘Heil the new dawn’ album:

“Europe awake, for the White man’s sake

Europe awake before it’s too late

Europe awake now

We’ve got to get together soon, and take our nations back

The race board, and the traitorous politicians should be sacked

You can’t turn on the TV because we know what we’re going to see

Either moaning immigrants, or the lying C.N.D.”

Other white power bands available on iTunes, to name a few, include Bully Boys, White Wash, White Wing, NON, H8Machine, Infester, Valhalla, and Fanisk. Although the company would argue that its catalogue is simply too large to closely monitor, other sites don’t seem to h ave that problem. Take for example MySpace, which has worked diligently with civil right groups to identify and remove racist music.

Apple, on the other hand, seems content to profit from bigotry. And its customers deserve to know why.

MJ Olahafa is a Research Fellow at the Center For New Community

20101221 Baghdad sculptor realises dream of returning home

20110624 (VIDEO) Graphic Novel is a commentary on the media

Article courtesy of PBS.org:

www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/06/conversation-brooke-gladstones-the-influencing-machine.html

The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media from WW Norton on Vimeo.

Brooke Gladstone's Graphic Commentary of Media's 'Influencing Machine'

Posted by Molly Finnegan , June 24, 2011

rooke Gladstone is the long time co-host and managing director of WNYC's On The Media. She has a new book about media and our society called The Influencing Machine. It takes the form of a comic book, illustrated by artist Josh Neufeld, the author of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge.

Gladstone joined us in our newsroom for a conversation:

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, you spent years reporting on, studying on, telling us about the media. Why write a book? What were you after?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, it took me about two decades to finally come to a conclusion about a few things.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yeah?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I always wanted to write a comic book. And I thought a comic book would be the perfect way to deal with this material.

JEFFREY BROWN: Why?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Because it's so complicated. And a comic book is both concise, dense and forces a kind of mental discipline that I have since used in my writing for the radio. You cannot waste a word. You don't spend your time in pyrotechnics. All the magic has to come from the ideas. And much less can you get from style, because you just don't have the space for it. So, from a writing point of view, that made-- that was a good choice for me, because: no temporizing, no thumb sucking. I had to really know what I was talking about.

JEFFREY BROWN: Now, what is it that, in all your years of looking at this so -- when you went to put this down -- what is it that you think most people do not understand about today's media that you wanted to help us understand?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That makes me sound so arrogant. Here's what I learned about the media, and what I learned about people when I went outside and spoke to them, is, invariably, there would be someone who would say in a public forum, 'Why aren't the media covering x?' I went, 'Wow, that's a good question. Where did you hear about x?' And invariably, it would be the New York Times, but it would be on A10, rather than, you know, in the front. And that's when it began to occur to me that what people really want, what they need from their media, is a reflection of their own values and their own priorities, and if you look at the polls of media trust, generally it's been on a solid decline--

JEFFREY BROWN: Yeah, I think we've all noticed that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But there have been spikes. And when there have been spikes, it is when the media are best reflecting the public mood. There was a spike right after the coverage of 9/11, because the anguish and incomprehension of the public was expressed by the media in those moments. But there was another spike during Katrina. Not because the coverage of Katrina was so terrific, because as we know it was a rife with inaccuracies, as was the immediate coverage after 911. But again, the media were expressing our pain.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you refer to the media as a mirror, and that is a way of saying that there is -- because you say it explicitly here -- there is no great media conspiracy, right? There is no manipulator behind the scenes to present, to make happen, whatever people see, so somehow it is a mirror. What does that--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: That's right. It's a funhouse mirror, it's a little cracked, a little distorted. But basically what you see in there is the reflection of our civilization, our politics at a given moment. And what we see in the media now, given that it is so vast, is the shards of a trillion reflecting mirrors. Basically anybody who has a cell phone in their pocket has an opportunity to contribute to the media, to participate in it, and to change it.

JEFFREY BROWN: So for example, I mean, there is a moment here when one of your cartoon characters looks ahead and says, why is there so much crap? Right? I mean we all hear it: Why is there so much crap in the media? But your answer is because, well there is crap in our society? What, because that's part of what our culture is about?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Part of it has to do with the fact that our culture is the way it is. Part of it has to do with the fact we are wired to like narratives, to like conflict, to like visuals, where we have an almost genetic predisposition to be interested in celebrities that we can project upon, and all of this triviality is kind of baked into the business, just like it's baked into us, and it's a kind of vicious circle. And I don't absolve the media of blame for being trivial, of rushing to judgment, of being full of garbage. But I also know that at the very moment when the media are just rife with crap, it's also full of some of the best reporting we've ever seen. Across the board. And then, in every phase of American journalism, we have come to what a lot of people think is the brink of apocalypse. The society is coming apart! And at every phase, we've pulled away from that brink, if in fact we were ever there at all. There has been brilliant reporting and dreadful reporting at every single phase of our culture, throughout the invention of journalism, in fact since the invention of the written word.

JEFFREY BROWN: But we have to be more open, transparent, etc. about, for example, biases. You have a long section here where you say--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Seven biases.

JEFFREY BROWN: Seven biases but not the one everybody talks about. Which is political bias.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Which is the easiest one. I mean, you know, here's the thing: People think that if a reporter has an opinion that they are then untrustworthy. Whereas we've seen throughout history, during the invention of the penny press, during the nation's founding, and on and on, that inflected journalism was the norm. And there was amazing reporting done in that period. Also horrendous reporting. It's really a mid-century aberration that objectivity, so-called, became the sort of founding-- the sort of standard bearer of great journalism. It doesn't guarantee great journalism. It can guarantee craven and misleading journalism. It's really how you deal with the information, not who you are, that matters. The biases that I worry about are the ones that are baked into the business and baked into human cognition.

JEFFREY BROWN: Such as?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Things like narrative bias. We love to squeeze things into stories with a beginning, middle and end. But most news, or at least a great deal of news, doesn't have that. Doesn't have villains and heroes and a narrative arc. I mean, especially science stories. Science stories are nothing but middle, nothing but process, which is why you end up with the kind of reporting that's like, you know, 'Coffee is good for you,' 'Coffee is bad for you,' 'No, coffee is good for you,' 'No, coffee is bad!' Because this is a process, there isn't an end. And political stories can be terrifically distorted, because you create a character. You know. Gore is a liar, Hillary is an emasculator, you know. Bush is a stupid frat boy. And then anything that deviates from there reporters are resistant to changing because once you have a template, you can just stuff everything into it and that's terribly misleading. There are visual biases, commercial biases, access biases, on and on. This is about the process of journalism and how we consume information and it's got nothing to do with politics.

JEFFREY BROWN: Alright, so what is your advice to media consumers?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: My advice to media consumers is to take responsibility for your behavior. Everything that they want and need is out there and they have to stop thinking that media is just cable news. You know, it's usually when people are hysterical over something, it's because of cable news, which has disproportionate impact for its tiny numbers. Really. And so my view is that if you don't like cable news, you can go through your life and be incredibly informed and never watch it. Let's face it, the Arab spring was reported largely by amateurs. Amateurs with attitudes and opinions and cell phones. But that doesn't mean that the people who were filing dispatches on Twitter or posting things on Facebook were liars and cheats. They were there, they were there for a reason, and they sent that information to the larger world, with the mainstream media acting as a signal amplifier.

JEFFREY BROWN: Did you have fun doing this, finally?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I always wanted to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer and this was as close as I could become. I get to turn into a dog, I become Medusa, Spiderman. I wandered through the Tarot deck and the Matrix, and all in pursuit of explaining, you know, a pretty complicated idea, which is, you know, if you go and look back a couple of millennia, we are changing, but it doesn't necessarily mean that we are, you know, dying as a civilization. We are simply evolving.

20110624 Code Word: Geronimo, IDW's graphic novel about the Osama Bin Laden Raid

IDW and Charlie Foxtrot Entertainment AnnounceCode Word: Geronimo Graphic Novel

n-depth retelling of the SEAL Team 6 raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound Available in September

Based on true events of the mission and written by Captain Dale Dye (USMC, Ret)

San Diego, CA (June 23, 2011) – IDW Publishing and Charlie Foxtrot Entertainment today have the honor of announcing CODE WORD: GERONIMO, an original graphic novel illustrating the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound by SEAL Team 6 on May 1, 2011. Expertly written by Captain Dale Dye (USMC, Ret.) and Dr. Julia Dye, Ph.D., CODE WORD: GERONIMO offers the amazing, moment-by-moment inside story of the clandestine raid that rid the world of this terrorist mastermind.

“Due to entirely appropriate security concerns, there is some creative license in our script,” said Captain Dye. “But I think readers will be gratified with the detail and thrilled with our take on one of the most daring and successful commando raids in American military history.”

This historical keepsake details the bravery and valor of SEAL Team 6 as it descends into Abbottabad, Pakistan and achieves the near impossible. Joining the Dyes to bring this incredible graphic novel to life are artists Gerry Kissell (The A-Team: War Stories, Iron Sky) and Amin Amat (Buckaroo Banzai, Iron Sky). John M. Del Vecchio, decorated Vietnam veteran and best-selling author of the The 13th Valley, will also provide afterword material. A portion of the proceeds from CODE WORD: GERONIMO will be donated to a charity supporting military service members.
“I have worked for many years now with Charlie Foxtrot Entertainment on a number of successful projects,” said Tom Waltz, IDW editor, former Marine and Desert Storm I veteran. “But none of those compare to the excitement and pride I have for CODE WORD: GERONIMO. The Dyes have put together a fantastic script detailing the heroically dangerous raid by SEAL Team 6 against Public Enemy Number One, Osama Bin Laden, and I firmly believe you won’t get a more accurate account of this pivotal moment in history unless it is told by the SEAL team members themselves.”

Following an exceptional career in the United States Marine Corps, Captain Dye is now best known as the military advisor to Hollywood for his work on over seventy films, from Platoon to Saving Private Ryan, and Band Of Brothers to The Pacific. Captain Dye is also the acclaimed author of many novels, including Outrage and Laos File.

CODE WORD: GERONIMO ($15.99, hardcover, full color, 88 pages) will be available in stores throughout North America on September 6, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-61377-097-9

About IDW Publishing
IDW is an award-winning publisher of comic books, graphic novels and trade paperbacks, based in San Diego, California. Renowned for its diverse catalog of licensed and independent titles, IDW publishes some of the most successful and popular titles in the industry, including: Hasbro’s The Transformers and G.I. JOE, Paramount’s Star Trek; HBO’s True Blood; the BBC’s DOCTOR WHO; Toho’s Godzilla; and comics and trade collections based on novels by worldwide bestselling author, James Patterson. IDW is also home to the Library of American Comics imprint, which publishes classic comic reprints; Yoe! Books, a partnership with Yoe! Studio; and is the print publisher for EA Comics.

IDW’s original horror series, 30 Days of Night, was launched as a major motion picture in October 2007 by Sony Pictures and was the #1 film in its first week of release. More information about the company can be found at IDWPublishing.com.

About Charlie Foxtrot Entertainment
Charlie Foxtrot Entertainment, LLC (CFE) is a military-based entertainment company that is “inspired by heroes.” It is engaged in the business of financing, producing and licensing, movies, documentaries, books, graphic novels, video games, music and merchandise--from its library of currently owned, and to-be-acquired, military oriented intellectual properties. CFE’s best-selling books and critically-acclaimed graphic novels provide a base for the development of its film and TV productions. The company takes great pride in the fact that all of its members are veterans of the U.S military—this provides CFE with a unique and authentic insight few others can achieve. More information about the company and its principals can be found at www.charliefoxtrotfilms.com

20110624 Malaysian Political Cartoonist/Activist's new book

Article courtesy of: www.malaysiakini.com/news/167887

Zunar's new book out now, launching July 2

Political satirist and cartoonist Zunar will be launching his latest cartoon publication 'Even My Pen Has a Stand' on July 2 and copies can now be ordered online.

Published by Kinibooks, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Malaysiakini, the book features a collection of his political cartoons which have appeared on the news portal from September 2010 to June 2011 as well as in Cartoonmovement.com, an international cartoon website.

"The title 'Even My Pen Has a Stand' was chosen because after I was arrested, detained and threatened, it is important for me to reiterate my stand that I will continue drawing until the last drop of my ink.

"My stance is clear. I will draw to expose the corruption practiced by the Barisan National government as well as fundamental key issues such as abuse of power, police brutality, violation of human rights and misuse of public funds," he said in a press statement today.

Zunar, whose real name Zulkiflee SM Anwar Ulhaque, was arrested on Sept 24 last year and was locked up for two days just hours before the launch of his penultimate cartoon book.

Prior to that, the government also banned six of his cartoon books.

"Will I be arrested or will this book be banned this time around? I do not have an answer for this but my advice to the Najib Abdul Razak administration is that it is uncivilised to use force by any means in order to stop a political cartoonist," he said.

Previously, Malaysiakini has published four other of his cartoon books including 'Cartoons On Tun… and Others' (2005), '1 Funny Malaysia' (2009) and 'Cartoon-O-Phobia (2010)'.

Retailing at RM25, the launching ceremony will be held at the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall on July 2 at 8pm and it will be launched by Lembah Pantai MP Nurul Izzah Anwar.

20110624 Will jail time affect this dissident’s art?

PETER PARKS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES - Chinese artist Ai Weiwei outside his studio in Beijing on June 23, 2011.

Will jail time affect this dissident’s art?

By Kriston Capps, Friday, June 24, 9:22 AM

On Wednesday, Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, a painter detained on April 3, was released on bail after confessing to tax evasion. According to Ai’s lawyer, the charges were just an “excuse” to silence his client — in 2009, Ai had unflinchingly criticized China’s communist regime, asking, “If you aren’t anti-China, are you even human?” in an online forum.
But three months in jail could lead Ai to be less visibly anti-China. After all, Ai is just one in a long line of artists who have dabbled in politics and suffered the consequences. How have other notable aesthetes responded to oppression?

Michelangelo (1475-1564): Even in the face of occasional disapproval from the Catholic Church, the Renaissance master championed a shockingly erotic style. When Florence fought and expelled the ruling Medici family in 1527, Michelangelo came to his city’s aid, helping fortify against invasion. This proved a bad bet: After Florence fell to the family in 1530, a Medici governor under Pope Clement VII ordered the artist’s assassination, forcing him into hiding. Later forgiven for his political sins, Michelangelo completed the sensuous “The Last Judgment” at the Sistine Chapel in 1541, a fresco commissioned by Pope Clement himself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881): Dostoevsky’s involvement with a radical, anti-czarist St. Petersburg literary group brought him the unwelcome attention of Czar Nicholas I, who sentenced him to death in 1849, then commuted the sentence just as the author was to be shot. Dostoevsky became an ardent nationalist, embracing deeply Orthodox Christian and Russophile beliefs that shaped his most prominent works, such as “Crime and Punishment” and “The Possessed.” His time as a political prisoner turned his focus from political ideology to the spiritual angst of “The Brothers Karamazov.”

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): Five years after he published his bleak novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” the great Irish dandy was sentenced to two years of hard labor in 1895 for homosexual behavior. The experience forever changed Wilde. After serving time, he published “De Profundis” and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” both lamentations darker than “Dorian Gray” and as depressing as “The Importance of Being Earnest” was buoyant.

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940): Only after his work was suppressed was Bulgakov able to write “The Master and Margarita,” his masterpiece. Though this great Soviet playwright and novelist never went to prison, self-styled theater critic Joseph Stalin took a personal interest in squashing his work. By 1929, the government had banned Bulgakov from publishing or staging his plays. Frustrated, he requested permission to emigrate in 1930; when Stalin telephoned him to ask whether he really wanted to leave, he promptly reconsidered. Bulgakov completed “Margarita” — the story of Satan’s arrival in Moscow in the 1930s and a vicious satire of Soviet life under Stalin — just before his death but didn’t live to see it published.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008): Though a communist until the mid-1950s, the foremost diarist of the Russian gulag never abandoned his faith in Christ or his hatred of the Soviet system. After eight years in prison camps for his derogatory writings about Stalin, Solzhenitsyn saw “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” ushered into print by Nikita Khrushchev as part of all-too-brief de-Stalinization in 1962. When the Cold War heated up again, Solzhenitsyn hid a decade’s worth of manuscripts that would become “The Gulag Archipelago,” published in 1973 in the West, but not until 1989 in Russia.
Owen Maseko (1975-): Maseko paints exactly what Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe doesn’t want to see — depictions of the murders of 20,000 Ndebele people at the hands of forces sympathetic to Mugabe in the 1980s. When police tried to remove Maseko’s work from Zimbabwe’s National Gallery in Bulawayo less than 24 hours after the exhibit’s opening in 2010, they used newspapers to cover the windows so that people could not see the graphic installations inside. Despite his arrest and brief imprisonment, Maseko remains defiant, out on bail and facing a 20-year sentence if convicted of undermining Mugabe’s authority. “As an artist, I have to be relevant to the society I live in,” he told the Observer, a British newspaper. “I do not have political motivations, just inspiration.”
kriston.capps@gmail.com

20110626 Artists re-imagine 'The Game of Life' in satirical exhibition

Artists re-imagine 'The Game of Life' in satirical exhibition

By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times arts writer

Political art can either aim straight at its targets in angry, activist mode — or it can turn to mockery and humor to pull off its effects.

The ironically titled "Social Security," a group exhibit at Kirkland Arts Center, suggests mockery works best.

Curated by Jayme Yahr and Deborah F. Lawrence, it showcases 11 Northwest artists riffing on the notion that "politics are embedded in every aspect of contemporary culture."

Three of them see politics permeating the game of life itself — or, rather, "The Game of Life." In an elaborate installation, Lara Kaminsky, Tina Russell and Jessie Wilson recast the classic Milton Bradley board game to better reflect the social divides of contemporary America. Kaminsky supplies an "Urban Ghetto Edition," while Wilson devises a "Fresh Off the Boat Edition" and Russell delivers a "Privileged Edition."



All three are barbed in their wit, with Kaminsky's "Urban Ghetto" being particularly well targeted ("If you have a job, get a second one"). The games are accompanied by a giddy, 1950s-style promotional trailer on video, with more samples of where a spin of the wheel can land you. On the down side: "Food service worker again?" On the "up" side: "The government just bailed out my company!"

Joining them on the satirical front is the ever-entertaining Charles Krafft who contributes a "Delft CCTV Camera," plus an assortment of weaponry in exquisitely painted slip-cast earthenware. Krafft mostly lets the ludicrous contrast between his medium and his content speak for itself, although on "Cannister Grenade" he adds some text: "Porcelain War Museum: Been There Smashed That."

Bill Whipple's cleverly crafted interactive wall sculptures operate similarly to Krafft's pieces. "Divisions," for instance, is a map of a finger-pointing U.S.A. that, with a playful turn of a crank, splits into four sections. His most poignant piece, "Erosion," has no moving parts, however. It's a map of the continental U.S. depicted in sharp, precipitous contours — a whole country melting away to nothing.

Lock-step factionalism is wittily nailed in "Rocker" by Lauren Grossman, a contraption in which two human heads, mounted on a steel-frame rocking-horse base, angrily confront each other. When you set the thing in motion, it puts an absurd spin on their hostilities.

Satire shades into agitprop and desolate melancholy in Kevin Wildermuth's work. "27.7 Billion Dollar Bill" bristles with messages on what our war expenditure in Iraq and Afghanistan has cost in lives and funds, and how it might have been better spent. The $27.7 billion of the title reflects Washington state's contribution to the wars.

Wildermuth's photographs from his travels on American back roads strike a similar downbeat note, with "Pawnshop Sign, Ellensburg, WA" sounding the alarm on a what a bankrupt, post-literate society might look like.

Other pieces in the show aren't as memorable. Still, as a meditation on the malaise and political divides afflicting our country, "Social Security" has considerable collective power.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com

20110626 Chris Rickert: Art swap isn't bird-brained but it's lacking

 vs 

Chris Rickert: Art swap isn't bird-brained but it's lacking

(Read more: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/chris_rickert/article_75da9a55-a9...)

Does Gov. Scott Walker hate multiracial groups of children playing happily together on the streets of Milwaukee?
Allow me to add my two cents to the brouhaha over why Walker removed Wisconsin artist David Lenz’s realistic portrait of three children — one black, one white, one Latino — from the Governor’s Mansion then replaced it with a painting of a bird.
By his own admission, Lenz had to navigate some fairly tricky political considerations in coming up with the piece, which is titled “Wishes in the Wind” and which he was commissioned to do specifically for the mansion.
He wanted to show children who represent issues and organizations he has an interest in. But he knew that making a strong political statement would not be well received no matter who was going to be living in the mansion (which hadn’t been decided when he started the work).
Thus, the real-life children he chose to paint were picked because they were associated with universally sympathetic groups — the Boys and Girls Club, the Milwaukee Rescue Mission and victims of drunken driving — and yet they serve as a reminder that children are affected by what politicians do.

The children never met each other before the painting was done, Lenz said, but he took some 2,000 photos of them and Milwaukee’s River View neighborhood — where the children are shown playing — before getting to work.
“I chose three children that would really try to skate down the middle politically,” he said. “The idea was not to be controversial.”
Despite this, Walker ditched the painting in favor of a century-old portrait of a bald eagle named Old Abe — put up as part of a larger display to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

Walker’s spokesman has denied the governor had any antipathy towards Lenz’s painting, and even Lenz admits he can’t be sure why Walker removed it. But liberals have seized on the decision as more proof of Walker’s disdain for the poor, the minorities, the struggling — which, they say, was already plenty evident in his move to cut millions from Medicaid and education funding from the state budget.
From reading online comments (never a good idea, in my opinion), Lenz said Walker’s detractors also profess to really like the painting, while Walker’s supporters say the work’s no good.
Aligning one’s taste in art with one’s politics is dumb enough. But it also seems unfair to draw too many conclusions about a governor’s priorities based on his response to a happy, noncontroversial scene that never happened — no matter how realistic its individual parts.
(Incidentally, I can’t be the only one who initially thought the portrait was a photo, nor who felt cheated when I realized it wasn’t. The prospect of three children from different ethnicities playing together on some bright winter day on the streets of a major Midwestern city is a nice one — especially when major Midwestern cities are arguably better known for their segregation, decay and crime.)
I went down to the Governor’s Mansion on Thursday to see the bird that replaced the kids. Old Abe was a mascot for Civil War soldiers from Wisconsin, and his portrait fits in with other Civil War artifacts spread over three rooms. Walker is something of a Civil War buff, I was told by a couple of tour guides.
Visitors to the mansion I spoke with didn’t have a problem with Old Abe. It might be different “if he didn’t have all that other Civil War stuff,” said Midge Griswold, who was visiting from Mesa, Ariz. But they liked Lenz’s work, too.
Lenz was probably right to be wary of controversy. The history, tailored grounds and ornate interior of the governor’s residence is a world away from the day-to-day challenges faced by the state’s residents and the messy political battles that affect them.
But governors are isolated enough — by their ideologies, their security details, their financial backers — and, if I had my way, I don’t think my first choice would be either the bird or Lenz’s fictional scene, although the Lenz work is a better start.
Instead, what about a photo of three homeless men idly chatting over a picnic table? A high school student nodding off in the classroom of a failing school? A lesbian couple signing the state’s domestic partner registry?
To me, a little realism seems like the best choice. Because in the end, the question is not whether the governor hates a multiracial group of children in a portrait striving to be noncontroversial, but if he loves Wisconsinites enough to be reminded of their real-life struggles every day where he lives.
Contact Chris Rickert at 608-252-6198 or crickert@madison.com, as well as on Facebook and Twitter (@ChrisRickertWSJ). His column appears Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/chris_rickert/article_75da9a55-a9...

20110630 Art v. State in China

 Art v. State in China

John FefferCo-director, Foreign Policy In Focus

(www.huffingtonpost.com/john-feffer/art-v-state-in-china_b_886353.html)

In the vast exhibition hall of London's Tate Modern, the installation looks from a distance like a huge patch of gravel. Perhaps it is the first stage of a construction site or the last stage of a demolition. Only when you come closer and crouch down can you identify the little objects. A discerning eye might determine that they are reproductions. The rest of us rely on an accompanying video about Ai Weiwei's project, which explains that the Chinese artist had commissioned a village of artists to produce the porcelain objects and paint them to resemble the real thing. What from far away looks like a gravel parking lot is actually one hundred million artfully produced sunflower seeds.

This collection of black-and-white seeds possesses a certain beauty. Its vastness suggests the vastness of China itself. And though China might look like one thing from a distance, if you move closer and closer to the country, it becomes something else altogether. Even when you're pressed up against it, you still might mistake the simulacrum for the real.

To understand Ai's Sunflower Seeds, you have to dig a little bit deeper. It helps to know that Chinese leader Mao Zedong and his Communist Party were often represented as the sun, as in the popular song, "The east is red, the sun is rising/China has brought forth a Mao Zedong." Sunflowers, then, are the people of China, who bend toward the beneficent light of the leader. And sunflower seeds are the product of the Chinese people.

(Video of "The East Is Red," where we are shown China's greatest resource at their best)

In the Tate Modern, though, all you see are the seeds. There is no sun. There are no sunflowers. There is only the fruit of a thousand flowers blooming.

But it is Ai Weiwei, not the Chinese leadership, who has generated these seeds. To create the work, Ai commissioned the artisans of Jingdezhen, a town famous in China for producing porcelain for the emperor and for export. During the Maoist era, the artisans also produced badges and statues of the Chinese leader. But now it is an artist with connections to the West who brings employment to the artisans. Ai cheerfully admits that the artists are not quite sure why they're doing what they're doing. But they are happy for the work and grateful to the artist. These echoes of sentiments from earlier eras are surely also part of the overall artwork.

Ai Weiwei has acquired a reputation for irony, whimsy, and pointed satire. He has photographed himself flipping the bird at the White House and in Tiananmen Square. He has made sculptures out of materials scavenged from ancient houses destroyed during China's relentless construction boom. He has dropped ancient vases to simulate the destruction of the Cultural Revolution. He has taken a nearly naked picture of himself jumping in the air with a stuffed animal concealing his groin. The caption, which reads "grass mud horse covering the middle," becomes overtly critical when you pronounce the characters with different tones to produce "fuck your mother, the Communist Party central committee."

But Ai was not content with making sly criticisms of the Chinese government. He openly denounced the authorities as "totalitarian" when he refused to attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. He blogged and tweeted about any number of sensitive subjects, from the June 4, 1989 crackdown at Tiananmen Square to the shoddy construction that left so many dead after the Wenchuan earthquake. The Chinese government tolerated Ai Weiwei's art in part because of his international reputation and perhaps because huge sculptures of conjoined bicycles were not exactly provoking the masses to revolt. The tweets and the blog entries, on the other hand, had the scent of jasmine to them. With the June 4 anniversary approaching and crowds deposing leaders in the Middle East, the Chinese authorities detained Ai on April 4 and kept him in prison for nearly three months.

Ai is now out, along with AIDS activist Hu Jia, who served more than three years on charges of sedition. As part of the terms of his recent release, Ai reportedly can't give interviews or use his Twitter account for a year. Also during that period, he can't leave Beijing without permission.

In democracies, artists can say what they like, more or less, but the price they pay is attenuated political impact; gone are the days when Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Jungle transformed social attitudes and created different political facts on the ground. In non-democracies, meanwhile, artists can have tremendous political impact, but often it's less for what they say than for what they're prevented from saying. With his art, Ai Weiwei has carefully navigated this borderline between the land of the Marginal and the land of the Forbidden in an attempt to be both relevant and provocative. Stripped of his Twitter megaphone, he might have to go back to letting his art speak for itself.

But it's hard to imagine Ai Weiwei falling silent. In her poem to the artist, The Last Son of China, Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor J.P. puts words in the artist's mouth:

"I have to speak as long as I have breath…no matter how thin…even if you tear out my tongue…I’ll still have my teeth…even if you pull out my teeth…I’ll still have my eyes… even if you gouge out my eyes…I’ll still have my ears…even if you pierce my eardrums…I’ll still have my hands… even if you chop off my hands…I’ll still have my guts …even if you grind up my guts… I’ll still have my heart that won’t stop beating… even if you smash my heart into a million pieces… they will turn into a billion sunflower seeds…"

 
Perhaps Ai just has to wait it out. State repression in China comes in cycles, with thaws and freezes succeeding one another according to the rise and fall of political factions in the leadership and the waxing and waning of civic courage. This latest crackdown has tempered the optimism of those who believe that economic liberalization easily translates into political liberalization. But a more careful reading suggests a different interpretation.

"The crackdown reveals just how far Chinese legal reform and civil society have progressed," writes FPIF contributor Vivian Yang in The Silver Lining in China's Crackdown. "Among those jailed or suffering from 'enforced disappearances,' a distinct group is fighting for human rights within the legal frame -- China's human rights lawyers. They defend the civil and political rights of Chinese citizens. Only after the Chinese Communist Party arrests them do we begin to notice these emerging human rights defenders."

It's not just human rights law. The field of environmental law has exploded in China. A movement has emerged to combat the wanton destruction of old buildings and monuments. Even the taboo subject of the death penalty has attracted a new civic initiative. China executes more people than the rest of the world combined, according to Amnesty International. "In the last 15 years, only two or three people in this country were trying to abolish the death penalty," law professor He Weifang told The Washington Post. Now he estimates that there are enough abolitionists to qualify as "a movement."

As FPIF columnist Walden Bello points out, workers also have been asserting their rights, with several strikes last year against transnational corporations resulting in substantial wage increases. But "a second wave of protest since May of this year, this time taking a violent riot form, has both government and the capitalist elites worried," Bello writes in Capital Is a Fickle Lover. "The mass base of the current protests is not the relatively educated, higher-paid workers at big Japanese subsidiaries, but the low-paid migrant workers that work for small and medium Chinese-owned enterprises that turn out goods for foreign buyers."

The Western media focuses on the courageous individuals, the Ai Weiweis and the Hu Jias and the Liu Xiaobos. These are indeed impressive people, and campaigns to free them are essential. But it's the movements that they inspire -- and the difficult and patient work of expanding the rule of law in China -- that will ultimately change the face of the country.

I suspect that Ai Weiwei feels the same way. Rather than doing his art entirely in isolation, he is constantly looking for ways to involve more and more people in his productions. In 2007, he arranged for 1,001 small-town Chinese to visit Germany as part of his Fairytale project. Around 1,600 artisans participated in Sunflower Seeds project. Perhaps for his next magic trick, which will be made all the more difficult by his internal exile in Beijing, he will turn a million Chinese bureaucrats into democrats -- with the help of the thousands of civic activists throughout China. Such a national transformation would be the ultimate performance art.

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Follow John Feffer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnfeffer

20110701 Pop v. Politics

When politicians fail to strike the right chord

After Tom Petty tells Michele Bachmann to stop using his song 'American Girl', Guy Adams on the perils of mixing pop and politics

Friday, 1 July 2011

It's started. With no less than 16 months until America goes to the polls, voters have been treated to that enduring staple of every modern presidential election season: a left-leaning musician trying to sue a Republican candidate for using one of their songs on the campaign trail.

At opposing sides of the latest musical showdown are Tom Petty, the blues-rock legend famous for bad haircuts and faded denim, and Michele Bachmann, the gaffe-prone Congresswoman from Minnesota who on Monday travelled to Iowa to launch a bid for the leadership of the free world.

Lawyers representing Mr Petty have fired a "cease-and-desist" letter to the ultra-conservative Bachmann after learning that she walked from the podium at the televised event to a 29-second clip from the opening of his 1977 hit, "American Girl".

The musician is understood to be upset that the track has been misappropriated without his permission, and concerned that fans may infer that he has somehow endorsed a candidate whose firmest political beliefs lie in direct opposition to his own social principles. Ms Bachmann is a vigorous opponent of gay rights, a lifelong campaigner against abortion, and a evangelical Christian who does not believe in the theory of evolution and argues that at the start of the 21st century, creationism ought to instead be taught in the nation's schools.

That plays well among the right-leaning demographic of Republican voters who subscribe to the Tea Party movement. Indeed, their star-spangled values are perhaps one reason why the Petty track was chosen for Monday's important event.

But her views sit rather less comfortably with Mr Petty, who has a long and very public history of filing lawsuits against Republicans who use his music without permission. In 2000, he succeeded in forcing George W Bush to stop using "Won't back down" as his campaign theme. "This use has not been approved," his lawyers informed "Dubya". "Any use made by you or your campaign creates, either intentionally or unintentionally, the impression that you and your campaign have been endorsed by Tom Petty, which is not true."

Although copyright law has always been unclear on the use of clips from famous songs at political rallies, the history of controversy starts with Ronald Reagan, who upset Bruce Springsteen by attempting to use the track "Born in the USA" as his election campaign theme.

Similar disputes have since emerged in every election season since. For obvious reasons, Democratic candidates generally find themselves given a freer pass by recording artists. Many Republican candidates, particularly at the conservative end of the spectrum, find it hard to get any popular musician to endorse them.

By way of an experiment, yesterday's Washington Post devoted hours to attempting to find a popular musician who would allow Bachmann to use their tunes. They found just one: the famously conservative rock star and gun-rights advocate, Ted Nugent.

"Michele Bachmann is clearly a Great American," Nugent wrote, in an email to the paper. "Her words have iron, her spirit is indefatigable and her beauty contagious. In a perfect world her ultimate campaign theme song would be [his 1977 hit] 'Wang Dang sweet poontang', just to fire up America and prove that political correctness is laughable."

Pop versus Politics

Angela Merkel and the Rolling Stones

The ageing rockers were not best pleased when German Chancellor Angela Merkel used their 1973 hit song "Angie" as the soundtrack to her 2005 leadership bid. Mick Jagger's crooning lyrics "Angie, you're beautiful" sang out across almost all of Merkel's campaign rallies and her supporters had even sported T-shirts and placards emblazoned with "Angie".

But an embarrassing row erupted when the Stones' agent later complained that the band had not granted its permission for the Christian Democratic party to use its song, and a spokesperson asserted that they "would probably have said 'no'" had they been asked. It may have come as a surprise to the Stones and their fans that the party had chosen it in the first place in view of its lyrics, which feature the lines: "All the dreams we held so close seemed to all go up in smoke... You can't say we're satisfied."

A spokesperson for Merkel's party dismissed the accusations, insisting that the German music distribution rights agency Gema had allowed it to use the song. "We will continue playing the song," a party spokesperson said.

Nicolas Sarkozy and MGMT

American indie duo MGMT demanded compensation from French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009 after his UMP party used one of the band's songs as its campaign soundtrack. The party overlooked Carla Bruni's pop songs in favour of MGMT's hit single "Kids". But despite the UMP's tough stance on illegal file-sharing, the party did not seek the band's permission to use the song as its anthem du jour.

"Normally MGMT steers clear of mixing music and politics," the band said. "But the fact that the UMP used our song without permission while simultaneously pushing anti-piracy legislation seemed a little wack." The UMP admitted it had used the song at its national congress meeting and in two online videos, but insisted a mistake had been made and offered compensation as a gesture of goodwill to the tune of €1. MGMT's French lawyer rejected the sum, calling it "insulting", and the UMP later agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to settle the dispute. The money was donated to charity.

Ronald Reagan and Bruce Springsteen

When The Boss's hit "Born in the USA" flooded American airwaves in 1984, it might have appeared to be an obvious patriotic anthem to accompany Republican President Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign that year. But Reagan's aides had failed to look closely at its lyrics. The song was widely seen as a condemnation of American society from the viewpoint of a Vietnam war veteran, and Springsteen did not take kindly to Reagan trading on the song's popularity, or on Springsteen's kudos with America's youth. "America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts. It rests in the message of hope so many young people admire: New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen," Reagan declared at a rally in America's Garden State that year. In response, Springsteen vented his disapproval in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. "I think people have a need to feel good about the country they live in. But what's happening, I think, is that that need is getting manipulated and exploited. You see that in the Reagan election ads on TV."

Charlie Crist and David Byrne

Talking Heads singer David Byrne began legal proceedings against the former governor of Florida Charlie Crist when the band's 1985 hit "Road to Nowhere" was used in a campaign video which attacked Crist's political rival Marco Rubio during their 2010 race for the US Senate. An outraged Byrne complained that Crist had not sought to obtain permission or licence to use the song in his video, which was uploaded to YouTube, and initially demanded $1m (£620,000) in damages. Byrne decided to settle out of court for an undisclosed sum in April after a face-to-face meeting with Crist, after which the ex-governor said his former adversary "couldn't have been a better guy".

Crist later released a YouTube video formally apologising to Byrne, in which he pledged: "Should there be any future election campaigns for me, I will respect and uphold the rights of artists and obtain permission or a licence for the use of any copyrighted work." Byrne said he had taken action against Crist because unlike other artists he had "the bucks and guts to challenge such usage".

20110703 EXHIBITION IN ISRAEL FEATURES TOP IRANIAN ARTISTS, BUT OTHERS FORCED TO CANCEL

Two of the five contemporary Iranian artists invited for a unique show of their work in Tel Aviv have pulled out after receiving threats. But for political -- and mostly artistic -- reasons, the show must go on.

By Ellie Armon Azoulay
HAARETZ/Worldcrunch
TEL AVIV - Two weeks before the opening of the groundbreaking “Tension” exhibition of contemporary Iranian art, two out of the five featured artists have pulled out of the show. "They were exhibiting in another country, and their exhibition there was shut down,” explained Yael Katz Ben Shalom, the curator of the exhibit at Tel Aviv’s Hezi Cohen Gallery. “They have received threats."
In another sign of the sensitivity of the exhibition is that only one of the remaining three participating artists, Mitra Tabrizian, agreed to requests for interviews. And even Tabrizian spoke only under the condition of speaking only about the works being presented rather than on other issues concerning her personal biography.
Nevertheless, the exhibition will place in the artistic limelight the political conflicts between different countries in the Middle East. The three artists, all of whom no longer live in Iran, examine concepts and images that transform into weapons in the power struggle between the countries. In itself, this is a small victory for art in the face of Iranian authorities' attempts of silencing these expressions on one hand, and the self-censorship of many expatriated artists on the other.
In an article published last year in the Pakistani magazine Nukta Art, the exiled Iranian artist Alaleh Alamir acknowledged the gravity of the censorship of art in Iran, including a list of banned topics such as the naked body, sex, or criticism of state authorities or Islam. Yet she stressed that self-censorship exercised by artists both inside Iran, and in the Iranian diaspora, is no less imposing.
Katz Ben Shalom, who initiated the exhibition in Israel, had worried about the risks of political sensitivities. She had managed to establish an artistic dialogue as a past director and curator of Artneuland, a unique art space and culture center in Berlin that hosts works of artists from Arab and other Muslim countries (including those participating in the exhibition in Tel Aviv), and fosters dialogue among Jews, Christians and Muslims.
Katz Ben Shalom chose to allow the participation of the two artists who had canceled their appearance by putting the names of the missing artworks without disclosing the names of the artists. "The absence of the works will be made manifest by their titles," she wrote in the text accompanying the exhibition. "Those titles that were supposed to comprise a complementary message to the images themselves, will now turn into signifiers of the absent that is present."
Ironically, a photo series of one of the absent artists is called "The Lost: The Lost Identity, The Lost Confidence, The Lost Memory, Freedom but not Quite". The act of removal of the works from the exhibition "only stresses the situation where art gains its autonomy, that moment where it deviates from the aesthetic discussion," says Katz Ben Shalom.
Iranians in exile, Ping Pong as sculpture
In the exhibition, Mitra Tabrizian, one of the most interesting living Iranian artists, presents the film The Predator, as well as photographs from the series “Border.” The film depicts an encounter in London between two men from some unidentified Muslim country, one is an author who has given up his life's work and the other is a soldier sent to assassinate him. The short film (28 minutes) addresses politics, immigration and globalization, and Tabrizian succeeds in reflecting the violent and racist way host countries treat immigrants and exiles, as well as minority members' comradeship in a foreign country.
In an email correspondence with Haaretz, Tabrizian says that this artwork was inspired after looking at the raw statistical numbers of Iranian exiles around the world in general, and in the UK in particular. "The UK has been a major destination for Iranians, hosting an estimated 42,492 of them," she says. "You always learn from others, as you cannot understand the self unless it related to the other."

Tabrizian's photographs from “Border” have titles that she says poetically communicate with the exiles' personal stories. For example, "Man with a Past", "Without Frontiers", "The Long Wait". While in the movie she features both actors and non-actors, in the photo series she points directly at the exiles themselves. "In 'Borders' I wanted to deviate from the usual approach of exploitation or victimization,” she explained. “Instead, inspired by contemporary Iranian cinema, often using non-actors and focusing on true stories, the work echoes film stills, each depicting a fragment of a story in which the participants 'play' themselves.”

Tabrizian didn't try to give this feeling a realistic representation, but rather created something that would be analogous to the concept of waiting in Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot'.
Katz Ben Shalom also emphasizes the notion of waiting, and sees it as a space of tension. According to her, "the line of tension passes between waiting and immigration – between the one who stays and dreams, remains as a potential immigrant and perhaps materializes his immigration in a virtual way, to one who has immigrated but also waits and dreams about returning."
Another artist featured in the exhibition is Babak Golkar, who was born in California in 1977, grew up in Tehran, and has lived in Vancouver since 1996. He's a conceptual and poetic artist who creates installations through the use of various media. His sharp artwork in the Tel Aviv exhibition, "PingPong", displays a version of a ping-pong table where the table and the net are round and the ball is made of wood. He created this work as a response to the political game in the Middle East.
The artist Alireza Ghandchi, who was born in Tehran in 1976 and now lives in Berlin, presents two photo series in which he's photographed with his body in extreme physical situations – tied up, mummified, injured and battered. All of these are staged in somehow Christian aesthetics and symbolism that brings up connotations of suffering, salvation and holiness. One example is the appearance of Jesus' stigmata expressed by his perforated feet.
The exhibition is on display until August 13. Asked what she thought when she was invited to display in Israel, Tabrizian replied: "My first reaction was 'absolute reluctance', for obvious reasons, considering the situation with the Palestinians. But then came the surprise – all the works that Yael Katz Ben Shalom was interested in were either about Iran or the recent work with the Muslim community in London. That the show is about Iranian artists, I thought was an interesting, daring and controversial decision (by the gallery), wanting to do a show like this in this political atmosphere."

Read the original article in Hebrew
All rights reserved ©Worldcrunch - in partnership with Haaretz

20110712 Arts Education Makes America Stronger by Making Stronger Americans

Arts Education Makes America Stronger by Making Stronger Americans.

 By: Kristen Paglia, Executive Director, Education and Programs at P.S. ARTS

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of sitting in on a discussion, hosted by the Writers Guild of America, between First Lady Michelle Obama and the Los Angeles creative community. Along with Dr. Jill Biden, the First Lady is spreading the message that all sectors of society can "Join Forces" in honoring and supporting America's service men and women. I reflected on what role artists and educators can personally play in this effort.

Throughout history and across cultures, art has been a vehicle for both questioning and commemoration. I, like countless people before and after me, will never forget the all-consuming feelings of reverence, grief and gratitude that I felt while standing in front of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Even my children, who were just 2 and 5 at the time, soaked in the mood of quiet reflection at the wall, solemnly trailing their fingers over the names of memorialized soldiers. I've lost count of the times that an image, poem or performance has inspired a thorough overhaul of something -- some ideal or "truth" -- I thought I knew but didn't. These two quintessential functions of art, commemorating and questioning, seem to exist on opposite poles at first glance, but they are clearly part of one vital patriotic continuum.

Joining the First Lady on the stage that day, along with "Fringe"-creator J.J. Abrams and "Army Wives"-creator Katherine Fugate, was Arnita Brigman Moore, wife of Marine Staff Sergeant Moore; retired Sergeant Bobby Jarman; and Captain Kelly Smith, a National Guard Aircraft Commander. They each told their personal story of heroism, filling me and everyone in the room with a deep respect for their service, and the service of all our military personnel. In the weeks following, leading up to the Fourth of July, I learned that the theme for our P.S. ARTS summer program in Central California was going to be "Patriotic." I had also began reading the incredible biography by Li Cunxin, "Mao's Last Dancer," which delves into the complicated relationship between arts and politics. The fireworks, the perspective of an artist who deeply loved his homeland and still defected to America and the mental picture of kids in a rural migrant farming community -- nearly all the children of immigrants -- crafting iconic American images got me thinking (again, as this is a subject often on my mind and in my heart): artists have a unique gift (or burden) to tell stories and share multiple perspectives, which could influence the course of a nation. Then, watching the final launch of the space shuttle Atlantis... wow. It all bubbled over (yup, I cried) when I saw artist Stephen Bach, in the midst of the media and masses recording with every manner of technology, furiously working on two canvases to document the event.

Dr. Jessica Hoffmann Davis, the founding director of the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (and, incidentally, the most influential mentor in my professional life), included a section in her curriculum asking students to consider the "generative tension" between the role of the artist as "world mover" and "world forsaker." Of course, artists are both simultaneously. In some cases, it is the innovator, the revolutionary, who emerges as a patriot. In some cases, it is the documentarian, the commemorator, who becomes a cultural icon. From my point of view as an arts educator and patriot, there is a critical need for all Americans, especially in times of war and economic uncertainty, to learn to be both world movers and world forsakers. Our country's future development and success depends on our children's ability to celebrate and fiercely defend American ideals, while constantly questioning, and inspiring others to question, individuals' interpretations of those ideals. The arts teach us how to do both.

I witnessed a powerful illustration of that point when I watched a fifth-grade student in Lawndale, Calif. recite a Langston-Hughes-inspired poem she has written, exploring and asserting her own American identity:

I am mixed.
I may not be your race
but I deserve respect.

Racial slurs are not me.
I may not be African-American or
Hispanic, or Latino, or White.

I deserve a relationship with California.
Hardships and pain have passed
through this delicate soul
and this fragile heart has been dented.
What begins a lovely day
with friends can turn gloomy.

Sticks and stones won't break my soul.
Get out of the way. I am invincible.
I will not wait in line.
I have arrived.

I, too, live America.

www.huffingtonpost.com/kristen-paglia/arts-education-makes-amer_b_893621.html

20110719 'This is freedom' – visual art and the Egyptian uprising

(Political street art in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising in February 2011. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP)

Sara Elkamel talks to Egyptian artists about cultural life in the country before and after the overthrow of Mubarak

Sara Elkamel, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 July 2011 21.41 BST

www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jul/19/egyptian-uprising-art-revolution-culture

Art may not have started the Egyptian revolution, but it played a large part once the spark was lit. Visual artists documented the people's uprising, first in Tahrir Square, and then across galleries in Cairo and Egypt in the months that followed. The young multimedia artist Ahmed Bassiouny was killed on the third day of the revolution; his work was shown posthumously at this year's Venice Biennale. Today, the art scene remains in a state of flux, experiencing a kind of chaotic freedom as demonstrators return to Tahrir Square.

During the Mubarak era of pseudo-democracy, many artists camouflaged their opposition behind symbolic colours and shapes. In the years leading up to the revolution, 58-year-old painter Mohamed Abla focused on social and environmental issues, his canvases crowded with thousands of dots – a comment on Egypt's burgeoning population. He also painted Lego-like apartments, loosely stacked, apparently about to topple over. His most controversial project in recent years was Street Talks, an exploration of social injustice that could not be exhibited in Egypt. "My art was against the regime, so I had no choice but to exhibit it abroad," he says. "But now, anybody can paint anything. This is freedom." In the first week of the uprising, Abla set up a three-day workshop for children in Tahrir Square, so people could paint through the long days. Today, working in his studio in central Cairo, a vibrant mess of colour, he paints dots that float among Egyptian flags, symbols of pride and hope.

Other artists are currently transforming the landscape. Hany Rashed, 36, paints the Egyptian flag among groups of protestors. Before the revolution, he says, "art was limited, aimless, superficial, due to the regime's pressure to keep societal issues away from our work." The revolution has now given them greater freedom of expression, as well as a subject. Today's art is mostly patriotic, and the Egyptian flag features heavily. "I believe that Egyptian art will now experience a very positive change," Rashed says.

Since the revolution, a few independent art galleries have opened up in Cairo – against the odds, as the Egyptian economy suffers in the wake of change. Curators and artists are investing in a new, open scene, hoping to put Egyptian art on the global map.

The most powerful art is not confined to white-walled galleries. The young graffiti artist Ganzeer has propagated street art and many others have followed suit, painting celebratory murals. Young photographers have also captured the revolution as it happened – Alaa Taher and Basem Samir, among them. In one of Taher's photographs, protestors march under a roof of deep-red fabric, as rays of sunlight illuminate their faces.

The 25 January revolution blurred the divide between popular and "fine" art. Art no longer belonged to the rich or those who could afford it; it was the property of the masses. Alongside the paintings and the photographs, there were witty cartoons and posters. Some even used their bodies as canvases. "Leave, I miss my wife" a man scribbled across his chest to the delight of the crowds. "Traditional art is no longer the star," says Abla. "The revolution moved art to the streets." The uprising may have brought political chaos, but there is a hope it could yet yield a more powerful Egyptian art.